698288
research-article2017
PSRXXX10.1177/1088868317698288Personality and Social Psychology ReviewSchein and Gray
Article
The Theory of Dyadic Morality:
Reinventing Moral Judgment by
Redefining Harm
Personality and Social Psychology Review
1­–39
© 2017 by the Society for Personality
and Social Psychology, Inc.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317698288
DOI: 10.1177/1088868317698288
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Chelsea Schein1 and Kurt Gray1
Abstract
The nature of harm—and therefore moral judgment—may be misunderstood. Rather than an objective matter of reason, we
argue that harm should be redefined as an intuitively perceived continuum. This redefinition provides a new understanding
of moral content and mechanism—the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). TDM suggests that acts are
condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm. This harm
is dyadic, involving an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient (A→P). TDM predicts causal links both from
harm to immorality (dyadic comparison) and from immorality to harm (dyadic completion). Together, these two processes
make the “dyadic loop,” explaining moral acquisition and polarization. TDM argues against intuitive harmless wrongs and
modular “foundations,” but embraces moral pluralism through varieties of values and the flexibility of perceived harm. Dyadic
morality impacts understandings of moral character, moral emotion, and political/cultural differences, and provides research
guidelines for moral psychology.
Keywords
morality, social cognition, judgment/decision making, moral foundations theory, values
The man intentionally gished the little girl, who cried.
Gish is not a real word, but when people read this sentence,
they automatically judge the man to be doing something
immoral.1 What causes this intuitive moral judgment?
Theories of morality often invoke the intrinsic wrongness of
certain acts, but here the act is unclear. Instead, people are
reacting to the structure of the act: an intentional agent is acting upon a vulnerable victim—and ostensibly causing her
harm (Hester, Payne, & Gray, 2017). Perceptions of harm not
only cause moral judgment here, but may also underlie moral
judgment in general.
Harm drives the moral condemnation of murder,
assault, rape, and theft (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993;
Mikhail, 2007), and—if moral rhetoric is taken at face
value—harm also drives the condemnation of pornography (Pierce, 2001), trigger warnings (Lukianoff & Haidt,
2015), homosexuality (Bryant, 1977), vaccinations
(Mnookin, 2012), transgender bathroom use (Harrison,
2016), dishonor (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), and even reading Harry Potter (James, 2010). In his guide to human
health, Dr. Kellogg condemned masturbation based on the
“scientific” claim that “neither the plague, nor war, nor
small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so
disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism” (Dr. Adam Clarke on masturbation, quoted in
Kellogg, 1890, p. 233). The creator of Kellogg’s cereal
was claiming that masturbation was morally wrong
because of the harm it caused.
Perceptions of harm are ubiquitous in moral judgments
and there are two possibilities for why. The first possibility—
currently favored in the field—is that perceptions of harm
are epiphenomenal spasms of post hoc reasoning, reflecting
only the moral mind's attempt to justify itself (Haidt, 2001,
2012). The second possibility—explored here—is that harm
is the fundamental basis by which moral judgments are made
and maintained.
Précis of Dyadic Morality
The Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM) suggests that moral
judgments revolve around a cognitive template of harm. In
dyadic morality—and throughout this article—harm has a
very specific definition: It involves two perceived and causally connected minds, an intentional agent causing damage
1
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kurt Gray, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
Email: [email protected]
2
Personality and Social Psychology Review 0(0)
Figure 2. Dyadic morality predicts that the continuum of moral
condemnation is predicted by a continuum of "dyadicness" (i.e.,
how dyadic an act intuitively seems to be).
Note. GMO = genetically modified food.
Figure 1. Moral judgment revolves around a fuzzy cognitive
template of harm, defined as the perception of an intentional
agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient.
 d

to a vulnerable patient (see Figure 1), denoted as  iA → vP  ,


or more simply (A→P). As we explore, this harm-based cognitive template functions intuitively and is rooted in innate
and evolved processes of the human mind; it is also shaped by
cultural learning, therefore allowing cultural pluralism. TDM
therefore reconciles social intuitionism (Haidt, 2001) with
developmental harm-centric theories (Turiel, 1983), while
also incorporating insights from modern pluralistic accounts
(Haidt, 2012). Dyadic morality is also compatible with constructionist accounts of emotion and cognition (Lindquist,
2013) and with modern domain-general understandings of
moral and nonmoral cognition (Helion & Pizarro, 2015;
Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011; Miller & Cushman, in press;
Van Bavel, FeldmanHall, & Mende-Siedlecki, 2015).
From Harm to Immorality, From Immorality to
Harm
Dyadic morality is a dynamic causal model, suggesting bidirectional—and mutually reinforcing—causal links between
harm (A→P) and moral judgment. The link from harm to
immorality means that perceived harm causes acts to be
judged as immoral; when acts seem harmful, they seem morally wrong.
This harm to immorality link allows for the acquisition of
morality through both firsthand perception of an act’s harmfulness (Blair, 1995; Smetana, 1985) and through another’s
testimony of harm (Rottman, Young, & Kelemen, 2017),
such as a pastor detailing the suffering caused by gay marriage (Comer, 2012).
The complementary link from immorality to harm means
that judgments of immorality also cause perceptions of harm;
when acts seem morally wrong, they seem harmful. This
causal link allows for moral acquisition through direct testimony of an act’s wrongness (e.g., parents say an act is just
wrong; Rottman et al., 2017), and entrenchment of these
moral judgments through subsequent perceptions of harm.
Together, these dynamic connections between harm and
immorality create a feedback cycle in which acts become
iteratively moralized and “harmified” through time and
social discussion (the “dyadic loop”), helping to explain
moral polarization and the concurrent “creep” of harm and
morality (Haslam, 2016; Schein & Gray, 2016; in press).
Causal links between harm and immorality provide the
most basic prediction of dyadic morality: that the immorality
of an act is fundamentally predicted by the amount of harm it
involves (or implies).
Immorality clearly exists on a continuum—from overspending, to speeding, to theft, to murder—and TDM predicts that this continuum of immorality is grounded in a
continuum of perceived harm or “dyadicness” (Figure 2).
The more an act seems to involve an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient, the more immoral it
should seem.
Importantly, this continuum of harm is a matter of intuitive perception—just like moral judgment—and not of reasoned objective fact. While reasoning can influence
perceptions of harm by arguing for (or against) its existence,
TDM suggest that the intuitive perception of harm is ultimately what drives moral judgment.
Harmless Wrongs?
The causal power of harm is largely uncontroversial, and
the field agrees that it accounts for the most typical and
universal moral judgments (Haidt, Graham, & Ditto, 2015;
Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014). However,
Schein and Gray
many argue for a set of “objectively harmless” moral
wrongs (e.g., consensual incest) in which perceptions of
harm reflect only post hoc reasoning (Haidt, 2001; Scott,
Inbar, & Rozin, 2016).
One problem with these claims is that “harmless” wrongs
are typically assessed with weird cases of dog-eating (Haidt
et al., 1993), corpse-sexing (Haidt & Hersh, 2001), animal
pornography (Eibach, Libby, & Ehrlinger, 2009), or masturbation while cuddling a teddy bear (Helzer & Pizarro,
2011)—and weirdness is tied to immorality (it represents a
norm violation; Gray & Keeney, 2015b).
The major problem with research on “harmless” wrongs
is that it ignores the perceptions of participants, relying
instead upon the assumptions of researchers—and participants see substantial harm in “harmless” wrongs (Royzman,
Kim, & Leeman, 2015). Past research also fails to assess
harm and morality intuitively, employing explicit self-perception questionnaires answered with ample time (Graham
& Haidt, 2012; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009).
When harm and morality are assessed intuitively, the
presence of harm in “harmless wrongs” is clear (Gray,
Schein, & Ward, 2014). We therefore suggest that it is judgments of harmlessness—and not harm—that require effortful
reasoning, because harm and morality are naturally fused
together in the human mind. Moreover, it is the presence of
perceived harm that distinguishes immoral acts from those
that are merely bad (Schein & Gray, 2015) or disgusting
(Schein, Ritter, & Gray, 2016).
The intuitive presence of harm in “harmless” wrongs is
important because these wrongs have been used to argue for
moral mechanisms independent of harm—such as the
“purity” module of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT;
Graham et al., 2013). Dyadic morality explicitly denies the
existence of these harm-independent mechanisms, a denial
consistent with ample recent research (Cameron, Lindquist
& Gray, 2015; Schein & Gray, 2015; Schein, Ritter, & Gray,
2016). Rather than distinct causal mechanisms that explain
moral judgment, TDM suggests that the moral “foundations”
are taxonomic categories that merely name different varieties of values, just as music "genres" name different varieties
of music. In addition to MFT, there are multiple taxonomies
that descriptively catalog political differences (Rai & Fiske,
2011; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987), but these researcher-compiled inventories should not be confused with fundamental
psychological processes.
Dyadic Pluralism
Dyadic morality embraces moral pluralism. TDM acknowledges that cultures moralize different values (Rachels, 1986;
Shweder, 2012), but predicts that moral pluralism is underlain by varying perceptions of harm (e.g., conservatives
moralize patriotism and chastity because they view their
violation as harmful—unlike liberals). TDM therefore supports diverse moral concerns such as loyalty, purity,
3
industriousness, and social order, but suggests that they are
best understood as “transformations” or “intermediaries” of
harm, values whose violation leads to perceptions of concrete harm. For example, Anita Bryant believed that the
“purity” violation of gay rights would convince kids to be
gay, which would not only destroy their vulnerable immortal souls but also undermine procreation and hence the
American family, which would bankrupt the nation and
eventually lead to anarchy (Bryant, 1977).
More succinctly, moral pluralism is enabled through
harm pluralism, which in turn is enabled by the fact that
harm is synthetic—constructed from the three elements of
an agent, a patient, and their causal link. Each of these elements can take on different forms depending on the culture
and context: Agents can be anything perceived to have
intentions such as a person, a corporation (Rai & Diermeier,
2015), a God (Gray & Wegner, 2010a), or a conspiratorial
governmental agency (Epperson, 1985); patients can be
anything perceived to have vulnerability (Bentham,
1970/1780; Crimston, Bain, Hornsey, & Bastian, 2016;
Singer, 1981) such as children (Dijker, 2010), adults, people
in a group (Cooley et al, 2017), future generations, animals
(Singer, 1975), or the environment (Bastian & Crimston,
2016); and the specific act can cause damage through physical destruction, mental suffering, or spiritual defilement.
Importantly, as people disagree about the potential sources
or recipients of harm, TDM helps to explain moral
disagreement.
Dyadic morality therefore suggests that morality is about
harm, but not “just” harm. Consider origami, in which infinitely different shapes emerge by folding the same simple
piece of paper; origami is paper but it’s not “just” paper. With
morality, infinitely different values—not just four, five, or
six—may be moralized through the combinatorial flexibility
of perceived harm. Dyadic morality further suggests that
morality is more than “just” harm by acknowledging the
importance of both norms (Monroe, Guglielmo, & Malle,
2012; Nichols, 2002; Sripada & Stich, 2005) and affect
(Greene, 2013; Haidt, 2003; Hutcherson & Gross, 2011), two
powerful elements in moral judgment.
Despite the diversity of perceived harm, some acts involve
relatively obvious harm because they represent proximate
evolutionary threats that directly endanger survival and procreation. This explains why people share relatively universal
moral intuitions about murder and abuse (Mikhail, 2009).
Conversely, some acts involve less obvious harm because
they represent distal evolutionary threats—they endanger
survival and procreation indirectly by threatening cultural
coordination and social status. This ambiguity of harm
explains the substantial moral disagreement engendered by
prostitution, religious adherence, patriotism, censorship,
immigration, and taxation (e.g., Dworkin, 1981; vs. MillerYoung, 2013).
Grounding moral judgment in perceived harm provides a
new—and hopeful—perspective on moral disagreement,
4
suggesting that liberals and conservatives share fundamentally the same moral mind, but just see harm differently
(Landy, 2016; Schein & Gray, 2015). By helping people
understand that “the other side” respects the sanctity of harm,
dyadic morality may help reduce the vindictiveness of moral
conversations. Perhaps moral chasms can be crossed with
bridges of perceived harm.
Outline
This article presents an in-depth review of dyadic morality.
Dyadic morality has been introduced before (Gray, Waytz, &
Young, 2012; Gray & Wegner, 2011b; Gray, Young, &
Waytz, 2012), but at that time, its claims outpaced the evidence—a point noted by many commentators (Alicke, 2012;
Ditto, Liu, & Wojcik, 2012; Haslam, 2012; Monroe et al.,
2012). Recent empirical work (Cheng, Ottati, & Price, 2013;
Clark, Chen, & Ditto, 2015; Gray, Schein, & Ward, 2014;
Royzman et al., 2015; Schein & Gray, 2015; Schein, Ritter,
& Gray, 2016) provide the opportunity to narrow the gap
between data and theory. This article provides an updated
version of TDM, one that specifies key constructs, integrates
related literature, corrects misconception, and lays out testable future predictions.
The article is structured into two main sections. The first
covers moral content—reviewing five key questions (and
their answers): (a) What makes an Act Immoral? (Norms,
Affect, and Harm), (b) What is Harm (Synthetic, Perceived,
Intuitive, a Continuum), (c) What is the Moral Dyad? (A
Fuzzy Cognitive Template), (d) Are there Harmless Wrongs?
(No: Speaking for Moral Dumbfounding), and (e) What
about other Moral Values? (They are Transformations and
Intermediaries of Harm).
The second section covers moral mechanism—reviewing
five more key questions (and their answers): (a) How do we
Make Moral Judgments? (Through Dyadic Comparison and
Direct Learning), (b) How do Moral Judgments Impact
Perceptions? (Through Dyadic Completion), (c) How are
Moral Judgments Extended and Entrenched? (Through The
Dyadic Loop), (d) How does Dyadic Morality Relate to
MFT? (It Argues Against Its Claim of Modularity), and (e) Is
There an Alternative to Modularity? (Yes: Constructionism).
After the second section, we briefly consider implications
of dyadic morality and how TDM might be further tested.
Moral Content
Philosophy is well known for asking definitional questions,
and as moral psychology grew out of philosophy, one frequent question is, “What is morality?” often formulated as
“What content separates the (im)moral from the non-moral?”
(Gert, 2015; Machery, 2012). In exploring questions about
moral content, we also explore questions of harm, including
how best to understand this idea, whether there are harmless
wrongs, and how harm interacts with various moral values.
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What Makes an Act Immoral? Norms,
Affect, and Harm
Defining Immorality
Although any complex concept defies a complete philosophical definition (Gert, 2015; Wittgenstein, 1953), one popular
working definition of moral judgment is “evaluations (good
vs. bad) of the actions or character of a person that are made
with respect to a set of virtues held to be obligatory by a culture or subculture” (Haidt, 2001, p. 817). Empirical research
reveals that moral judgments often have unique signatures:
Compared with nonmoral judgments, moral judgments are
held with deeper conviction (Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis,
2005; Skitka, Washburn, & Carsel, 2015), are often less amenable to compromise and trade-offs (Ginges, Atran, Medin,
& Shikaki, 2007; Tetlock, Kristel, Beth, Green, & Lerner,
2000), are more motivating and legitimizing of behavior
(Effron & Miller, 2012; Ryan, 2014; Skitka & Wisneski,
2011; van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2012), are more
likely to bind together social groups (Graham & Haidt, 2010;
Haidt, 2012, Chapter 9; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013), are
seen as more objective and universal (Goodwin & Darley,
2008, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb, Shaw,
Langley, Cottam, & Lewis, 2004), and more independent of
authority (Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig,
1987; Wisneski, Lytle, & Skitka, 2009; though see Piazza,
Sousa, & Holbrook, 2013). Immoral acts are also seen as
intrinsically deserving of blame (Malle, Guglielmo, &
Monroe, 2014) and punishment (Hart, 2008; Shultz,
Schleifer, & Altman, 1981; Skitka & Houston, 2001), and as
intrinsically tied to outrage and other negative emotions.
We suggest that an analogy for moral judgments is fire:
affectively hot (Gray & Wegner, 2011a; Haidt, 2003;
Hutcherson & Gross, 2011), igniting strong views (Skitka
et al., 2005), and even serving as a common focus for ritual
that can both bring groups together (Graham & Haidt, 2010;
Greene, 2013) or be used to destroy (Atran & Ginges, 2012;
Halevy, Kreps, Weisel, & Goldenberg, 2015). Fire requires
three components to ignite—heat, oxygen, and fuel; moral
judgment may also require three components.
Integrating diverse research (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz,
2012; Haidt, 2001; Nichols, 2002; Turiel et al., 1987), we suggest that moral judgments emerge when three components are
present: norm violations, negative affect, and dyadic harm.
These components are not as distinct as those of fire, but are
causally interconnected. Norm violations are negative and
may prompt perceptions of harm, negative affect predisposes
people to see norm violations and harm, and dyadic harm is
typically a norm violation and leads to negative affect. All
these components seem to be present in moral judgments.
Norms
Norms are expectancies (Bicchieri & Muldoon, 2014;
Schelling, 1981), beliefs (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991),
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Schein and Gray
values (Nichols, 2002; Parsons, 1951), and rules (Sripada &
Stich, 2005) about how other people act (descriptive) or
should act (injunctive; Reno, Cialdini, & Kallgren, 1993). As
such, moral violations always violate norms (Malle et al.,
2014; Monroe et al., 2012; Nichols, 2002). These norms can
be prescriptive (what people should do) and proscriptive
(what people should not do; Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp,
2009), with the latter most frequently tied to behaviors
(Kochanska, Coy, & Murray, 2001) and to moral judgment:
the most memorable of the ten commandments govern what
though “shalt not” do. Some definitions of norms involve the
consequences for breaking them—which include punishment (Axelrod, 1986)—but we suggest that these “richer”
definitions blur into moral judgment. In addition to many
moral norms, there are thousands of nonmoral norms governing conventions of social life (Bicchieri, 2005; Machery,
2012), such as what to wear to school (Turiel, 1983).
Therefore, we must ask what separates conventional norms
from moral norms (Machery, 2012; Smetana, 1981).
Negative affect. One possibility is that negative affect differentiates conventional norms from moral norms (Nichols,
2002). Norm violations that garner moral condemnation are
uniformly negative: giving a stranger a million dollars might
violate an expectancy, but it isn’t immoral. The importance
of negativity is highlighted by one theory that suggests that
moral judgments are “norms + feelings” (Nichols, 2002), in
which strong negative affect differentiates the unconventional from the immoral. This account is consistent with
research highlighting the important role of emotions in moral
cognition (Haidt, 2003; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006).
Although developmental psychology once emphasized reason over emotion in moral judgment (Kohlberg, 1969; Rest,
1975), studies find that moral judgments are often intuitive
and laden with negative affect (Haidt, 2001), and that amplifying negative affect amplifies moral judgment (Horberg,
Oveis, & Keltner, 2011; Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2012;
Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006).
Despite being integral to moral judgment, negative affect
cannot alone distinguish the immoral from the unconventional as people feel negative affect and express anger when
observing nonmoral norm violations (Brauer & Chekroun,
2005; Santee & Jackson, 1977). Imagine an adult spitting in
their soup at a restaurant before eating it (Nichols, 2002).
This act is certainly both counter-normative and disgusting,
but lacks the authority-independent, objective-seeming
punch of other immoral deeds.
Admittedly, people use the word “wrong” to describe
soup-spitting, but this word—although popular in moral psychology questionnaires (Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Haidt et al.,
1993; though see Cushman, 2008, for discussion of question
wording; and Clifford, Iyengar, Cabeza, & SinnottArmstrong, 2015, for specifying “morally wrong”)—is
vague. It is “wrong” to spell morality with two “m”s, and yet
few would judge this act worthy of blame or punishment.
What then separates “wrong” negative norm violation from
“morally wrong” negative norm violations (Gert, 2015;
Machery, 2012)? We suggest that the answer is harm.
Harm
Harm’s importance to morality was suggested long ago by
philosophers (Bentham, 1970/1780; Hume, 1777; Mill,
1861; Singer, 1981), and explored empirically by developmental psychologists (Piaget, 1932; Turiel et al., 1987), who
revealed that both children and adults reliably use the presence of suffering victims to separate the unconventional
from the immoral (Huebner, Lee, & Hauser, 2010; Turiel
et al., 1987). Even 6-month old infants (Hamlin, 2012; Van
de Vondervoort & Hamlin, 2016)—and some nonhuman primates (Sheskin & Santos, 2012)—use harm as a basis for
social evaluation, reflecting its evolutionary importance
(Haidt & Joseph, 2007). For example, rhesus monkeys avoid
pulling on a chain to get food if doing so also shocks another
monkey (Masserman, Wechkin, & Terris, 1964), reflecting a
concern for well-being that is even more prominent in great
apes (Lakshminarayanan & Santos, 2008; Warneken, Hare,
Melis, Hanus, & Tomasello, 2007; Warneken & Tomasello,
2006).
Preventing harm to oneself and one’s kin—that is, one’s
genes—was likely a key motivating factor for the evolution
of morality (Haidt & Joseph, 2007; Hauser, 2006). There is
nothing that impedes your genes propagating more than you
or an offspring being murdered, having your livelihood stolen, having someone impregnate your spouse, getting a sexually transmitted disease, or being enslaved by a neighboring
civilization. Without prohibitions against harm—whether
direct or indirect—not only would genetic propagation be
impaired, but cultures would likely collapse into chaos.
Given its evolutionary importance, it follows that harm
should be the most developmentally basic and universal psychological cause of moral judgment.
Harmful acts such as murder, rape, assault, abuse, and
theft evoke powerful moral outrage (Hutcherson & Gross,
2011) and are uniformly condemned across cultures (Mead,
1961; Mikhail, 2007, 2009; Shweder, 2012). Concerns about
harm also form the basis of laws (Fletcher, 1998; Holmes,
1909) which can be understood as the codification of a society’s moral code (Marmor & Sarch, 2015). When new laws
are passed, whether about censorship (E. N. Brown, 2014;
Schein, Goranson, & Gray, 2015), gay marriage (Kennedy,
2015), or bathroom use (Carcaño v. McCrory, 2016), lawmakers uniformly ground them in a perceived source of harm
they are intended to eliminate.
In addition, harm dominates everyday morality: a “big
data” study using momentary assessments of daily life found
that harm was the most frequent concern in moral judgment
in both liberals and conservatives (Hofmann et al., 2014).
Our own recent work also reveals that concerns about harm
are the most cognitively salient—when people are asked to
6
generate an example of something that is “morally wrong,”
more than 90% offer an example of harm, such as murder or
abuse (Schein & Gray, 2015).
The TDM affirms both the ultimate and psychological
importance of harm in moral judgment, and harm’s ability to
reliably separate violations of morality from those of convention. Dyadic morality also acknowledges psychological
links between harm and both norm violations and negative
affect. In being immoral, dyadically harmful acts are also
norm violations (Mikhail, 2007; Sripada & Stich, 2005), and
generators of negative affect (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, &
Haidt, 1999). Thus, the presence of harm alone can often
provide all three components of immorality and fuel the
flame of moral condemnation.
The importance of harm in moral judgment suggests that
its nature is obvious, but unfortunately it is not. Dyadic morality suggests that harm has been largely misunderstood, and
that this misunderstanding has led to broader confusion in
psychology. Past operationalizations of harm have depicted
harm as an objective property of an act causing physical or
emotional suffering to a person, or animal—as evidenced by
blood, broken bones, and tears (Graham et al., 2011; though
see Turiel et al., 1987, for an argument about how harm is
perceived). In this view, only acts such as murder, assault, and
physical and emotional abuse qualify for the label “harm”
(Graham et al., 2009). As objective properties are amenable to
reasoning, harm was also seen as grounded in reason. For
example, research on moral dilemmas ties considerations of
harm (i.e., utilitarianism) to the operation of rational thought
(Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008;
Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001;
Suter & Hertwig, 2011; though see Gawronski & Beer, 2016).
In addition to assumptions of objectivity and reason, a
subtler assumption in some past research is that harm is
binary. While some research has certainly differentiated
degrees of harmfulness (e.g., personal vs. impersonal;
Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006), other study designs
imply that harm is either present or not, such that an act is
harmful or harmless (Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000).
We suggest that all of these assumptions have led researchers
to incorrectly reject harm as an explanation for diverse moral
judgments.
A review of the literature suggest that harm should be
redefined: rather than objective, reasoned, and binary, TDM
defines harm as a synthetic combination of agents causing
damage to patients, and suggests that harm is perceived, intuitive, and a continuum.
What Is Harm? Synthetic, Perceived,
Intuitive, a Continuum
Harm Is Synthetic
The Merriam-Webster dictionary (“Definition of Harm,”
2016) defines harm as “physical or mental damage or injury:
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something that causes someone or something to be hurt, broken, made less valuable or successful, etc.” This definition
highlights two essential elements of harm within morality—
causation and damage to vulnerable victims—but it misses
an important third component: an intentional agent. Acts
such as car accidents, unexpected falls, and natural disasters
are all harmful, but they are not immoral in the same way as
child abuse (Cushman, 2008). That accidental injuries and
murder are both termed “harmful” is a source of confusion,
similar to that surrounding the word “wrong.” When TDM
refers to harm, it is a very specific kind of harm: an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient.
This definition is synthetic, consisting of three elements:
an intentional agent, a vulnerable patient, and a causal link of
damage between them. Together, these three elements combine to yield the moral dyad of two interacting minds—a perceived agent who acts and a perceived patient who receives
the act. We outline this formal dyadic definition of harm here
to prevent confusion throughout the article and in discussions more broadly; when dyadic morality uses the term
“harm,” this is what is meant.
The dyadic structure of harm has been noted historically
by philosophers (Aristotle, BC350) and legal scholars (Hart
& Honoré, 1985), and reflects the dyadic structure of both
action and language (R. Brown & Fish, 1983; Mikhail, 2007;
Strickland, Fisher, & Knobe, 2012). Contemporary theories
in moral psychology also endorse the dyadic nature of harm,
whether in the structure of “ME HURT YOU” (Greene,
Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004), or more complex
computations that integrate causality and intentionality
(Cushman & Young, 2011; Mikhail, 2007).
One popular battery of moral scenarios includes five scenarios designed to tap concerns about harm, and all five
include the presence of an intentional agent causing damage
to a vulnerable patient (e.g., an adult sticks a pin into the
hand of a child; Graham & Haidt, 2012). Another battery
includes 27 scenarios of harm and all of them follow a dyadic
structure (e.g., You see a woman throwing her cat across the
room for scratching the furniture; Clifford et al., 2015).
These surveys—and many more scenarios used to study
morality (Killen, Lynn Mulvey, Richardson, Jampol, &
Woodward, 2011; Smetana, 1985)— reflect the dyadic structure of harm. Moreover, the consistent moral condemnation
of these harmful violations reveals that this dyadic structure
causes robust moral judgments for both liberals and conservatives (Haidt, 2007; Schein & Gray, 2015). We therefore
suggest that claims that harm is dyadic—and that dyadic
harm is tied to moral judgment—are uncontroversial.
Two Moral Minds
Central to TDM’s understanding of harm is the kinds of minds
possessed by its doer (the agent) and its recipient (the patient;
Wegner & Gray, 2016). In general, people perceive mental
qualities along two broad dimensions, distinguishing between
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Schein and Gray
agency (doing, thinking) and experience (feeling, sensing;
Gray, Jenkins, Heberlein, & Wegner, 2011). While adult
humans are seen to possess both agency and experience, puppies and children are seen to possess mostly experience, and
God and Google are seen to possess mostly agency (Gray
et al., 2011). More colloquially, those with agency—adults,
God (Gray & Wegner, 2010a), and corporations (Rai &
Diermeier, 2015)—can be understood as “thinking doers,” and
those with experience—adults, children (Schein et al., 2015),
and animals (Bentham, 1970/1780; Singer, 1975)—can be
understood as “vulnerable feelers” (Wegner & Gray, 2016).
Agency is linked to moral responsibility (Eshleman,
2014; Feigenson & Park, 2006), consistent with legal doctrine that ties responsibility (mens rea) to the mental capacity
for planning, intention, and forethought (Hart & Honoré,
1985; Shaver, 1985). Agency—being a thinking doer—is
thus what qualifies one as a moral agent (who possesses
moral agency). This link between mind and moral status is
apparent in debates about adolescent sentencing (Steinberg
& Scott, 2003) and the capital punishment of those with
mental disabilities (Ellis, 2003), both of which revolve
around questions of capacity for planning and intention.
Conversely, experience is tied to moral rights, consistent
with philosophy that ties rights to vulnerability and the
ability to suffer (Bentham, 1970/1780; Singer, 1975).
Experience—being a vulnerable feeler—is thus what qualifies one as a moral patient (who possesses moral patiency),
as evident from debates about abortion that revolve around a
fetus’s ability to feel. Pro-life advocates see a vulnerable,
young child in need of protection (H.R. 356 - 109th Congress,
2005), whereas pro-choice advocates see a mindless mass of
replicating cells (Benatar & Benatar, 2001). The same questions about suffering and vulnerability also exist within contemporary debates of animals rights (Bratanova, Loughnan,
& Bastian, 2011; Foer, 2010), and historical debates about
slavery (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1856). Perceptions of
patiency (or lack thereof) directly affect moral treatment
(Haslam, 2006), such as when the denial of experience to
Black adults predicts the endorsement of police brutality
(Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008).
It is important to note that the mere perception of suffering
and vulnerability is not enough to give rise to a robust moral
judgment. Instead, one must care about the vulnerable mind
via empathy (Baron-Cohen, 2011; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987).
Psychopaths can identify that others can feel—though less so
than normal people (Gray et al., 2011)—but lack empathy for
their suffering (Blair, 1995). Empathy is not a “cold” cognitive state of simply recognizing suffering; even from a young
age, others’ suffering evokes emotion (Eisenberg, Spinrad, &
Sadovsky, 2006), and motivates altruistic behavior (de Waal,
2008). Newborn infants recognize the crying of others (G. B.
Martin & Clark, 1982; Simner, 1971), and pre-linguistic children show inclinations toward helping others in distress
(Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). Importantly, children show
more empathy for suffering caused by legitimate moral
wrongs, than for “cry-babies,” suggesting that recognizing
interpersonal harm is a unique impetus for morality (Leslie,
Mallon, & DiCorcia, 2006).
Predicting Moral Condemnation With Minds and
Causation
A dyadic understanding of harm allows us to predict which
acts should be judged as most harmful and therefore as most
immoral. Moral judgment is proportional to the agency of
agents, the experience of patients, and the clarity of causation between them; acts with obviously intentional agents
who cause obvious damage to obviously vulnerable patients
should seem both most harmful and immoral. Consistent
with this idea, people will robustly condemn the CEO of a
corporation (obvious thinking doer) for taking a 2-year-old
(obvious vulnerable feeler) and hitting her across the face
(causing obvious damage). On the contrary, people will not
generally condemn a 1-year-old who squishes an ant, because
toddlers lack agency and ants lack experience.
In addition to the general mental capacities of agents and
patients, moral judgments also hinge on the agent’s specific
intentionality and the patient’s specific suffering within a
given act. Someone capable of deep reflection may kill
another person, but they will be blamed less if they were of
unsound mind at the time, or acted accidentally (Malle et al.,
2014; Roberts, Golding, & Fincham, 1987). Likewise, an
agent who targets someone generally sensitive to pain but
fails to harm them (attempted murder) will be punished less
than one who actually kills them (Young & Saxe, 2010).
Harm is not merely the presence of an intentional agent
and suffering patient but also involves a causal act linking
them together (Cushman, 2015; Cushman et al., 2006). The
clearer this causation, the more obvious the harm, which is
why moral judgments are attenuated when causality is unclear
(Fincham & Roberts, 1985; Fincham & Shultz, 1981). The
distinction between action and inaction (or omission and
commission) arises from differences in perceived causality
(Baron & Ritov, 2004). Poisoning an opponent by recommending a salad containing peanuts is judged as more
immoral than not stopping the opponent from ordering it himself (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991) because failing to speak
is causally opaque (DeScioli, Bruening, & Kurzban, 2011).
A clear real-world example of the importance of clear
causation comes from hiking drug prices. If Company A
wants to raise prices of a life-saving medication, they are
condemned if they do it directly. On the contrary, if they do
it through selling it to an intermediary, it seems less immoral,
because the causation (and intention) are indirect (Paharia,
Kassam, Greene, & Bazerman, 2009). The ambiguity of causation also explains why mafia kingpins put layers of people
(and ignorance) between themselves and dirty deeds.
The power of dyadic elements is made clear by the competing strategies of lawyers during court proceedings.
Prosecutors typically argue for the intentionality
8
and premeditation of the defendant, the vulnerability and
suffering of the plaintiff, and the clear damage caused. In
contrast, defense attorneys argue that no damage was caused,
that the plaintiff is not vulnerable and suffered little, and that
their client did not intend any wrongdoing (sometimes by
virtue of insanity; Roberts et al., 1987). The success of these
arguments upon juries arises from the fact that harm is subjective, with the elements of agency, experience, and causation each a matter of perception.
Harm Is a Matter of Perception
In Jonathan Foer’s (2010) book “Animals,” he interviews
two turkey farmers. One of them—a factory farmer—sees
farming as a matter of pure economics, and fails to see either
harm or immorality when birds are kept confined in tiny
cages with their beaks and claws seared off. The other—a
man who maintains his own personal farm—sees farming as
a moral issue, and abhors the idea of harming his birds, in
whom he sees a rich mental life. That two adult men can
view the same issue and come to such different conclusions
suggests that harm is in the eye of the beholder. Dyadic
morality allows for the subjectivity of harm because its synthetic elements—agency, vulnerability, and causality—are
all perceived.
Questions of mind are essential for judgments of harm
and immorality, but the nature of other minds is ambiguous
(Hyslop, 2015). You can be certain of your own mental states
(Descartes, 1641), but those of others can never be directly
experienced, and so are ultimately inaccessible (Avramides,
2001). This “problem of other minds” means that we can
never be certain whether someone possesses the capacity for
agency (i.e., intention and planning) when they act. For
example, when two 12-year-old girls tried to murder their
friend during a sleepover (The Associated Press, 2016), they
claimed that—at the time—they lacked an appreciation of
right versus wrong. Of course, there may be an objective fact
about the lucidity of their minds during the attempted murder, but these facts only affect moral judgment via others’
perceptions.
As ambiguous as agency may be, questions of patiency/
experience are even more opaque because feelings of pain
and suffering are internal sensations (A. Smith, 1812). Even
with tears and screams, whether someone (or something) is
legitimately experiencing pain is up for debate. For example,
a 20-week-old fetus will twitch and grimace when poked in
the heel (Benatar & Benatar, 2001), but does this reaction
demonstrate real pain? The same concerns appear with
adults, such as when people question whether a victim of
sexual assault “really” suffered or is just trying to get attention or money. These perceptions of suffering are shaped by
various factors such as the victim’s race (Hoffman, Trawalter,
Axt, & Oliver, 2016), the perceived deservingness of the
pain (Weiner, 1993), and even the number of people in pain
(Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997).
Personality and Social Psychology Review 0(0)
Just as with mind, questions of causality are ambiguous.
As Hume remarked long ago, we can never directly observe
causation but only infer its presence from the co-occurrence
of two events (Hume, 1740). This inference of causation can
be clear when it involves physical events such as a cue hitting an eight ball (Michotte, 1963), but causation in human
events is more opaque (Wegner & Wheatley, 1999), especially when events are complex (Phillips & Shaw, 2015). For
example, when a town’s water supply is poisoned 30 years
after the closing of a mine, is it because of natural occurring
arsenic or because of corporate malfeasance? Both may
cause suffering, but only the latter is “harmful” in a dyadic—
and moral—sense.
Perceived harm also plays a role in acts that lead only
probabilistically to suffering, such as drunk driving or negligence (Malle et al., 2014; J. W. Martin & Cushman, 2016a).
Typically, when someone drives after a few drinks, they
arrive home safely and do no damage. However, sometimes
drunk drivers will crash their vehicle, destroying people’s
property and sometimes killing the innocent. People respond
strongly to these cases of clear suffering but also to acts of
potential harm because they can entertain counterfactuals—
thinking “what if . . . ?” (Spellman & Gilbert, 2014). Some
have critiqued dyadic morality as being incapable of accounting for the moral condemnation of negligence or recklessness (Pizarro, Tannenbaum, & Uhlmann, 2012), but this
criticism only holds if people do not link these acts to potential harm—and they do.
Others have critiqued dyadic morality for being unable to
account for the victim blaming (Niemi & Young, 2016) frequently observed after sexual assault (Niemi & Young, 2014;
Suarez & Gadalla, 2010). However, dyadic morality explains
this phenomenon as ambiguity about the “true” identity of
the agent and patient (Hester & Gray, 2017). While the physical perpetrator and victim within rape is clear, the ultimate
(i.e., mental) agent is a matter of perception, with some perceiving the sexual assaulter as ultimately the victim of the
sexual assaultee’s capriciousness or mixed signals. Cases of
victim blaming—and sympathizing with the perpetrator—
are instances of “dyadic reversal” in which perceptions of
mental agency and patiency are exactly opposite the physical
structure of the act (Hester & Gray, 2017). Consistent with
classic accounts of attribution (Weiner, 1993), the more a
victim seems to be a responsible agent, the less she is seen as
suffering, and the more a perpetrator seems to be a suffering
patient (e.g., after receiving harsh punishment), the less he is
seen as responsible (a hydraulic relation called “moral typecasting”; Gray & Wegner, 2009).
The perceived nature of harm is reinforced by anthropological accounts revealing that although norms concerning
harm are universal, the specifics of who can do harm
(agents), who can receive it (patients), and how it can be
done (causation) are culturally constrained by different
understandings of mind and causality (Mead, 1961;
Shweder, 2012). Cultural learning informs perceptions of
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Schein and Gray
who can intend, what constitutes causality, and what can be
harmed. Holding livestock morally responsible seems preposterous now, but in medieval Europe, animals such as pigs
were seen fit to stand trial (Oldridge, 2004). Cultures can
also constrain empathy, such as via propaganda campaigns
of dehumanization that define others as enemies rather than
people (Haslam, 2006; Staub, 1992). Even perceptions of
causation are embedded in cultural worldviews. If witchcraft exists, then suddenly the mere chanting of incoherent
syllables can cause moral harm. Even just within the United
States, Protestants are more likely than Jews to believe that
beliefs in one’s heart can be the source of harmful outcomes
(Cohen & Rozin, 2001).
In the terms of Turiel and colleagues (1987), there are different “informational assumptions” (p. 189) about the nature
of the world that shape perceptions of harm. Ascribing causal
power to witchcraft allows for evil to be perpetrated through
thoughts or glances (e.g., the evil eye), opening these behaviors up to condemnation (Cohen & Rozin, 2001; Pronin,
Wegner, McCarthy, & Rodriguez, 2006). Cultures who
emphasize an immortal human soul also believe that the dead
can be harmed—and so moralize funeral rites (Rachels, 1986;
Shweder, 2012). For example, Brahman Indians believe it is
highly immoral for an eldest son to eat chicken after his
father’s funeral because he is responsible for purifying his
father’s “death pollution” through eating a vegetarian diet. By
eating chicken, he undermines this process and condemns his
father’s soul to eternal suffering (Shweder, 2012). Similarly,
the Hua of New Guinea believe that the blood of individual
members of a community are intertwined, and so defiling
one’s own body threatens communal well-being (Meigs,
1984; cited in Haidt, Rozin, Mccauley, & Imada, 1997).
These perceptions of causation and vulnerability are often
motivated (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli,
1996), and can be amplified through anthropomorphism (seeing mind in nonhumans; Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007)
and diminished through dehumanization (stripping mind
from humans; Haslam, 2006). In the case of the turkey farmers described above, it would be distressing for the factory
farmer to believe that he was complicit in turkey genocide,
and so he strips away mind from the birds and sees his techniques (e.g., pumping birds full of antibiotics) as merely
mechanistic. Indeed, empirical research has found that after
eating animals, people are more likely to deny the mind to
similar animals, and the mere categorization of an animal as
food undermines mental trait attribution (Bastian, Loughnan,
Haslam, & Radke, 2012; Bratanova et al., 2011). Similarly,
interviews of prison personnel found that executioners exhibited the greatest tendency for dehumanization of prisoners
relative to staff supporting the death-row inmates, and noninvolved prison guards (Osofsky, Bandura, & Zimbardo, 2005).
The subjectivity of harm is perhaps revealed best in modern political discourse, such as when one person sees gay
marriage as an expression of love, and another sees the
destruction of families, souls, and the minds of children
(Adam, 2003; Anderson, 2013; Comer, 2012). Compared
with liberals, conservatives are more likely to be religious
and nationalistic (Layman, 2001), explaining in part why
they might see both souls and America as vulnerable to harm
(Haidt, 2012). Political disagreements about harm also
appear in moral debates about transgender bathroom use
(Carcaño v. McCrory, 2016), masturbation (Laqueur, 2004),
and pornography, which the Republican National Committee
has labeled “a public health crisis” (Peters, 2016). One might
argue that one side of each debate is wrong, and that there is
an objective fact about harm, such that pornography either
causes harm or not. However, we suggest that claims of
“objective” harm are misplaced, at least as they concern
moral psychology.
The field of moral psychology has long accepted the perceived nature of morality (Schein, Hester, & Gray, 2016), but
for some reason, has implied that harm is objective—such as
when researchers reassure participants that acts of consensual incest are objectively harmless (Haidt et al., 2000). Such
assumptions contradict not only the experience of political
debates but also the anthropological accounts upon which
modern moral psychology is built (Shweder, 2012; Shweder,
Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987). We suggest that there is no firm
basis to accept morality as perceived but not harm—especially when they always seem to go together. Of course, one
could argue that moral judgments and perceptions of harm
are different in kind, with moral judgments being intuitive
and perceptions of harm being reasoned rationalization. We
evaluate this claim next.
Harm Is Intuitive
Considerations of harm loom large in moral reasoning and
moral rhetoric whether it concerns pornography, prostitution,
genetically modified foods (GMOs), stem cell research, gun
rights, gay rights, or free speech (Haslam, 2016; Kennedy,
2015; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; Schein & Gray, 2016).
Despite (or perhaps because of) the clear evidence of harm’s
prominence in moral reasoning, some scholars conclude that
harm has a limited role in intuitive moral judgment (Haidt,
2012). However, this division between intuition and reason
is a false dichotomy as many psychological elements used in
reasoning are also highly intuitive (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer,
2011).
Research from diverse areas suggest that perceptions of
harm are intuitive. Children too young to engage in conscious rationalization—and too young to use language—use
harm in their social evaluations (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011).
Research using high-density event-related potentials (ERPs;
Decety & Cacioppo, 2012) and implanted brain electrodes
(Hesse et al., 2015) reveal that adults can not only see harm
within milliseconds but also differentiate its varieties (Decety
& Cacioppo, 2012). Our own research reveals that judgments
of harm can happen rapidly and without conscious deliberation (Schein & Gray, 2015). In fact, when people are asked to
10
judge issues (e.g., pornography) on both immorality and
harmfulness, they respond just as fast—if not faster—to
questions about harm (Schein & Gray, 2015). This is exactly
the result one would expect if considerations of harm were
not only intuitive but also fed into moral judgments.
The intuitiveness of harm may be controversial, but so
once was the intuitiveness of morality (the debate is actually
ongoing; Smetana & Killen, 2008). Early developmental
accounts of morality emphasized the importance of reason in
moral cognition (Kohlberg, 1969; Rest, 1975). However, a
revolution in social psychology revealed that—in nonmoral
domains—reasoning often plays second fiddle to intuition
and affect (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Zajonc, 1980). Inspired
by this revolution, Haidt (2001) and Greene and colleagues
(2001) revealed that moral judgments are often rapid and
affectively negative reactions that arise with relatively little
thought (Haidt, 2001). Of course, reasoning can play an
important role in shaping moral judgment (Paxton & Greene,
2010; Smetana & Killen, 2008) and conversation (Mercier,
2011), even if its presence is relatively infrequent.
The main evidence that harm is a product of reasoning
and not of intuition comes from moral dumbfounding
research (explored later) and moral dilemmas (i.e., trolley
problems), which are constructed to pit utilitarian reasoning
(kill one to save five) against deontological intuitions (don’t
kill; Greene et al., 2001). As considerations of harm have
been equated with utilitarianism, they have been casted as
opposing the intuitions of deontology. This logic is faulty,
however, as deontological intuitions are potentially more
about harm than are utilitarian reasoning—after all, deontological intuitions are reactions against killing.
Furthermore, moral dilemmas frequently confound utilitarianism and deontology with action and inaction
(Gawronski & Beer, 2016). For example, the utilitarian
option in trolley problems almost always involves committing an action (e.g., push a man), whereas the deontological
option involves inaction (e.g., don’t push a man). Research
also reveals that deontological and utilitarian impulses do
not conflict but are independent, a fact revealed by the technique of process dissociation (Conway & Gawronski, 2013).
More broadly, trolley problems are engaging precisely
because they pit reason against intuitions, which is atypical
in moral judgment. People do not agonize over whether murder is wrong because of intuitions or reasons because it is
both—it feels wrong to murder, and there are also good reasons not to do it. It is worth stating explicitly that perceiving
harm seldom involves rational, utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. People are lousy moral utility calculators (Sheskin &
Baumard, 2016), and generally not consequentialist thinkers
(Baron, 1994). Instead, harm is an intuitive perception—one
that is affective and often motivated, and which may or may
not cohere to an external objective reality of the immediate
or absolute number of people killed.
One common rational for denying the intuitiveness of
harm comes from a strict—and heavily contested (Helion &
Personality and Social Psychology Review 0(0)
Pizarro, 2015; Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011; Van Bavel
et al., 2015)—dual-process model of the mind in which the
processes of intuition are qualitatively distinct from those of
reasoning (Greene, 2013; Haidt, 2012). While this dualprocess account aligns with historical conceptions of the passions versus reasons (Descartes, 1641; Hume, 1740), it does
not represent modern understanding of decision making
(Lindquist & Barrett, 2012). Instead, intuitions and reasoning often operate in tandem, in which initial intuitive judgments are modified by conscious reasoning (given sufficient
capacity or motivation; Haidt, 2001). We suggest that the
same is true with harm—initial intuitive perceptions of harm
can be modified by additional conscious reasoning.
We acknowledge that in courts of law, people do deliberately process questions of intent, suffering, and causality to
arrive at judgments of blameworthiness (Hart & Honoré,
1985; Malle et al., 2014). However, each of the three dyadic
elements—and therefore harm—are also processed intuitively in both adults and children. Even if considerations of
intention can involve sophisticated reasoning, adults intuitively perceive the presence of intentional agents (H. C.
Barrett, Todd, Miller, & Blythe, 2005) and infer intentions
(Rosset, 2008)—and infants effortlessly see goals behind
even minimal actions (Woodward, 2005). Even if reactions
to others’ suffering can be dampened though motivated emotion regulation (Cameron & Payne, 2011), both adults and
children intuitively perceive the suffering of others (Decety
& Jackson, 2004; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Preston & de
Waal, 2001), which automatically generates empathic concern (Eisenberg et al., 2006). Even if causation can be considered explicitly (Jones & Nisbett, 1972), adults and
children also intuitively perceive causation in physical
(Leslie & Keeble, 1987; Michotte, 1963) and social events
(Hartshorne, 2014).
Overall, both harm itself and the elements composing
harm are perceived intuitively, even if reason can strengthen
or weaken these perceptions. The same is true about moral
judgments, which arise intuitively and yet may be shaped by
reason. Indeed, the predictions of dyadic morality concern
intuitions of both harm and morality: intuitive perceptions of
harm should predict intuitive judgments of immorality, along
a continuum.
Harm Is a Continuum
Is watching professionally produced pornographic films
harmful? People feel very strongly about the answer to this
question. One could argue that women in the adult film
industry are being exploited (Dworkin, 1981), but one could
also argue that women use sex to empower themselves and
make a reasonable living (Miller-Young, 2013). However,
even staunch opponents of pornography would admit that the
typical pornographic film with consenting adults is less
harmful and less immoral than child pornography. In adult
pornography, there is ambiguity about whether the film stars
11
Schein and Gray
Figure 3. Response times for categorizing an act as immoral
and harmful. They reveal an intuitive continuum of harm that
corresponds to an intuitive continuum of immorality (Study 4;
Schein & Gray, 2015).
are agents or patients, but no ambiguity exists with child pornography as children are clear victims of exploitation.
Dyadic morality suggests that moral judgments are
aligned on a continuum (or gradient) of harm (see Figure 2).
At the most severe end are acts in which intentional agents,
vulnerable patients, and the causation of damage are very
easy to perceive, such as prototypically immoral—and evolutionarily threatening—acts such as murder, rape, and
abuse. At the least severe end are acts in which it is extremely
difficult (but not technically impossible) to perceive any
dyadic elements, such as meditating alone outside on a summer’s day. In between these ends of black and white is a vast
expanse of gray, in which the salience of agents, patients, and
causation—that is, harm—is ambiguous and therefore subject to disagreement.
One need only examine legal sentencing to see that morality is a continuum, in which people are executed for premeditated murder, imprisoned for defrauding investors, and
merely fined for speeding. This legal continuum is explicitly
tied to the degree of harm each of these acts seems to involve,
with aggravated assault causing more obvious suffering than
fraud. The graded nature of harm also exists in people’s
minds. Our own work reveals that when people make rapid
judgments of the harmfulness of various immoral acts—
ranging from murder to gossip—their reaction times form a
clear gradient (Schein & Gray, 2015; Study 4). Murder and
rape are rated as harmful at ~600 ms, followed by adultery
and abuse at ~700 ms, followed by prostitution and lying at
~800 ms, followed finally by disrespect and gossip at ~850
ms. Importantly, this intuitive gradient matches the intuitive
gradient of immorality, and exists even when controlling for
general negativity (see Figure 3).
This continuum of harm is facilitated by the continua of an
agents’ perceived general agency, and a patient’s perceived
general experience (Gray et al., 2011; see also S. T. Fiske,
Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; P. Robbins & Jack, 2006; Sytsma &
Machery, 2009), as well as their specific agency and experience within an act, and the causality connecting them
(Cushman, 2015; J. W. Martin & Cushman, 2016b; Murray &
Lombrozo, 2016; Phillips & Shaw, 2015; Spellman & Gilbert,
2014). When infants die of heatstroke after being forgotten,
parents are blamed, but less so than when infants are beaten to
death. When bartenders serve a drunk patron who then drives
home and kills someone, they are blamed, but less so than a
bartender who directly poisons someone (Cushman, 2015; J.
W. Martin & Cushman, 2016b; Murray & Lombrozo, 2016;
Phillips & Shaw, 2015; Spellman & Gilbert, 2014). When a
would-be murderer misses his victim who nonetheless dies
while racing from the scene, he is blamed, but less so than the
directly successful shooter (Cushman, 2008; Robinson &
Darley, 1995). As none of these examples are controversial,
we suggest that the gradient of harm—and its synthetic elements—is uncontroversial.
What Is the Moral Dyad? A Fuzzy
Cognitive Template
A continuum of harm means that the dyadic definition of (A
→ P) does not describe a strict philosophical definition of
immorality with a clear boundary, but instead a fuzzy psychological template (Figure 1). This fuzziness is not a dodge,
but instead a fact of life: It is impossible to draw a firm in/out
line around any rich human concept, as Wittgenstein (1953)
discovered long ago when trying to determine the authoritative definition of “games.”
Consistent with Wittgenstein’s experience, modern cognitive science reveals that concepts are not instantiated by a list
of binary inclusionary and exclusionary criterion, but instead
by a set of graded synthetic criteria whose combined presence determines a continuum of concept categorization
(Medin, 1989; E. E. Smith & Medin, 1981). For example, the
stereotype of “African American” includes a number of features including skin tone, facial features, speaking style,
manner of dress, occupation, and socioeconomic status
(Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004; Gaertner &
McLaughlin, 1983). A target is judged stereotypically
African American to the extent that these features are collectively salient, such that hip-hop artist 50 Cent seems more
African American than President Obama, who in turn seems
more African American than Bill Gates.
The moral dyad is a similarly fuzzy template—and is
therefore consistent with volumes of work on social cognition (S. T. Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Its synthetic elements are
12
an intentional agent, vulnerable patient, and causation of
damage, and acts that better match these combined criteria—
by being more saliently dyadic—are more robustly categorized as harmful and thus as immoral. More succinctly, an act
is immoral to the extent of its perceived “dyadicness.” A
graphical representation of the fuzzy dyad is therefore not a
circle, but instead a circular gradient (see Figures 1-3).
In the (dark) middle of the template are acts that are maximally dyadic such as murder, rape, child abuse, and animal
slaughter—the kind of acts used in various “harm” scenarios
(Graham & Haidt, 2012). Moral theories agree that both
harm and immorality exist in this dark, central, obviously
dyadic area (Haidt et al., 2015). Likewise, theories agree that
neither harm nor immorality likely exist in the light obviously nondyadic areas. However, some theories assume that
harm is sharply circumscribed and ends with direct physical
harm, while TDM advocates for gradations of harm, which
can include intuitive perceptions of some harm in acts of
spiritual destruction and societal dissolution.
Understanding morality as a continuum offers a deflationary perspective on research arguing for cognitive differences
across moral scenarios (Young & Saxe, 2011). One set of
studies revealed that considerations of intention were less
important for acts involving sex than those involving violence (Young & Saxe, 2011). Specifically, the difference in
moral condemnation between accidentally versus intentionally committing incest was smaller than the difference in
moral condemnation between accidentally versus intentionally committing murder. This result was interpreted as
revealing distinct cognition between the moral judgment of
sex versus violence (i.e., purity and harm), but it failed to
consider the importance of relative severity. People rate murder as more harmful and immoral than incest (Gray &
Keeney, 2015b). As intention is an element of harm, we
would expect intention to matter more for the more harmful
murder—and it does. Said another way, all these results
reveal is that the elements of immorality are relevant in
moral judgment to the extent that something is immoral.
More broadly, when making claims about different kinds of
immorality, one must first control for different amounts of
immorality.
An intuitive continuum of perceived harm suggests that
the question researchers should ask themselves—and participants—when conducting moral psychology is not “is it
immoral?” or “is it harmful?” but “how much does x seem
immoral?” and “how much does x seem harmful?”
The Key Prediction of Dyadic Morality
Given an updated understanding of harm as a synthetic, perceived, intuitive continuum, we now revisit the main prediction of dyadic morality, that acts are immoral to the extent
that they are harmful. TDM suggests that moral judgments
are made according to the intuitive perception of synthetic
harm—intentional agents causing damage to vulnerable
Personality and Social Psychology Review 0(0)
patients (A → P). This suggests that very harmful acts should
be judged as very immoral, that somewhat harmful acts
should be judged as somewhat immoral, and that minimally
harmful acts should be judged as minimally immoral.
The alignment of harm and immorality is reasonably easy
to test. One may simply obtain intuitive perceptions of harm
and see if they predict intuitive judgments of immorality.
Importantly, this harm is not merely badness or sadness, but
perceptions of damage caused to a vulnerable entity at the
behest of an intentional agent. Consistent with these predictions, both our research and those of others reveals that perceptions of harm are robustly tied to moral condemnation
(Gray, Schein, & Ward, 2014; Royzman et al., 2015; Schein
& Gray, 2015; Schein, Ritter, & Gray, 2016)—research that
we explore throughout this article.
One point of clarification is that while some perception of
harm is typically necessary for an act to enter the (fuzzy)
moral sphere, harm is not the only relevant consideration.
Once an act is moralized, then cultural norms or emotions
(e.g., disgust) can amplify moral convictions and moral outrage (Wisneski et al., 2009; Wisneski & Skitka, 2017 ), which
may be tied to certain behaviors (Brandt, Wisneski, & Skitka,
2015). In addition, we acknowledge that we are describing a
statistical relation and not a philosophical absolute, and so
there may be exceptions to the predictive power of harm.
Nevertheless, dyadic morality predicts that any exceptions to dyadic morality are rare, unstable, and maintained
only with effortful reasoning. In fact, we suggest that most
apparent exceptions to dyadic morality are not exceptions at
all; rather, they are cases in which harm is misunderstood to
be an objective, reasoned fact rather than a perceived intuitive continuum (Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Scott et al., 2016).
Nowhere is harm more misunderstood than in moral dumbfounding and the condemnation of “harmless” wrongs (Haidt
et al., 2000).
Are There Harmless Wrongs? No:
Speaking for Moral Dumbfounding
Dyadic morality argues that harmless wrongs—although
logically possible—should be psychologically rare.
Consistent with this idea, unless there is some mitigating feature (e.g., self-defense),2 people never seem to say that something is both obviously dyadically harmful (A→ P) and
obviously permissible, as revealed by judgments of scenarios
involving direct canonical harm (Turiel, 1983). However,
one program of research suggests that people will sometimes
endorse the wrongness of ostensibly harmless acts—moral
dumbfounding (Haidt et al., 2000).
In one classic study, participants were presented with an
“objectively” harmless act such as secret, loving, consensual
incest and asked to judge its morality (Haidt et al., 2000).
Participants uniformly judged this act as immoral, despite
experimenter’s explicit reassurances of their harmlessness.
When participants were later asked to explain their moral
13
Schein and Gray
judgments, they were rendered speechless—a phenomenon
labeled “moral dumbfounding.”
Moral dumbfounding is among the most discussed effects
in contemporary moral psychology; although it is unpublished, this study has garnered more than 200 citations as of
2016. Most interpret these findings as revealing the irrelevance of objective harm in moral judgments (Russell &
Giner-Sorolla, 2013), and the existence of a harm-independent purity mechanism (Haidt, 2001, 2007; for arguments in
this tradition, see Scott et al., 2016). However, we suggest
that moral dumbfounding actually provides powerful evidence in support of the harm’s role in moral judgment, when
harm is properly understood.
Perceived Harm in “Harmless” Wrongs
The most obvious limitation with moral dumbfounding is that
it conflates objective harm with perceived harm. Researchers
may have “carefully written” the stories “to be harmless”
(Haidt et al., 2000, p. 8), but this does not mean that participants share their perspective. In one published set of studies,
adults in both Philadelphia and rural Brazil were asked about
the morality of consensual incest (Haidt et al.,1993). The data
revealed that 45% of adults judged this act as universally
immoral, and 64% judged this act as deserving of punishment. Importantly, other measures also revealed that people
perceived this act as harmful, with 59% of participants identifying victims damaged from this act. The close alignment
between perceptions of harm and judgments of immorality
are exactly what dyadic morality predicts.
In a more recent set of studies, Royzman and colleagues
(2015) recreated the traditional dumbfounding paradigm. But
this time, they measured whether participants actually believed
the acts to be harmless, for example asking, “how believable
do you find that Julie and Mark’s (who are siblings) having
sex with each other will have no bad consequences . . . ”
(Royzman et al., 2015, p. 300). In this design, participants
simply rejected the set-up of the incest vignette, holding on to
the belief that incest has negative real-world implications. The
incredulity of participants persisted in individual interviews,
even after researchers argued in favor of incest’s harmlessness. It is not hard to explain this persistence of perceived
harm. After all, incest is reliably harmful in almost every single context except in moral psychology scenarios.
We find it perplexing that scholars inspired by anthropology have failed to acknowledge these perceptions of harm.
Imagine if emotion researchers claimed to have designed
scenarios which were “objectively” angering or saddening
and yet failed to elicit these emotions in participants. It is
unlikely that such claims of “objective emotionality” would
be accepted. We believe that same evidentiary standards
should be used in moral psychology; if participants deny that
these scenarios are harmless, then we should accept their
experience as legitimate. Given the anthropological roots of
modern moral psychology, the recommendation that we take
seriously participant perceptions should be uncontroversial—even if (or especially when) they conflict with the
designs of researchers.
Intuitive Harm in Dumbfounding
Also perplexing is how scholars will accept a priori that perceptions of morality are intuitive but not those of harm.
When people are presented with consensual incest, their
immediate—that is, intuitive—response is to call it harmful
(Royzman et al., 2015). Intuitive responses are hard to dispel
with conscious reasoning, and harm is no exception; even
with experimenters forcefully arguing with them, participants cannot shake their perceptions of harm. In fact, participants are only “rendered dumb” when they are banned from
reporting what they see as the basis of their moral judgment—harm. We suggest that preventing participants from
mentioning harm misleads moral psychology from identifying the true underlying causes of moral judgment.
As an analogy, consider someone who fears flying because
it seems dangerous to them. You could argue that flying is actually quite safe—and they might rationally agree with you—but
their perceptions of danger are intuitive and therefore resistant
to reason (Mayer, Merckelbach, & Muris, 2000). Flying may
be objectively harmless, but subjective perceptions of potential
harm do legitimately cause people’s fear (Seligman, 1971).
Moreover, if you asked people with flight phobias to tell you
why they feared flying while banning them from mentioning
feelings of danger, they would be rendered dumb—but this
tells us nothing deep about the causes of their fear.
Our own studies reveal additional evidence for the intuitive persistence of harm in “harmless wrongs.” In one study,
we asked participants to rate the immorality and harmfulness
(i.e., the presence of victims) of three kinds of acts: those that
were unambiguously harmful (e.g., murder), unambiguously
harmless (e.g., taking the bus), and ostensibly harmless acts
such as rubbing feces on a Bible (Gray, Schein, & Ward,
2014). Half of the participants were given ample time and
told to think carefully (to tap “reason”), and half were given
a tight time restrain and were told to respond with their gut
(to tap “intuition”).
The study revealed that perceptions of harm were higher
when people were forced to respond rapidly. These initial,
intuitive perceptions of harm are not merely metaphorical or
symbolic (though an appeal to symbolic harms can certainly
occur later; Gutierrez & Giner-Sorolla, 2007), as people see
physical pain and children’s misery in wrongdoing (Gray,
Schein, & Ward, 2014). Consistent with dyadic morality,
harm is tied to immorality when assessed intuitively, with
reason diminishing this link.
A Continuum of Harm in Dumbfounding
Classic moral dumbfounding studies claim that objectively
harmless acts are seen as immoral—a statement that
14
collapses continua into dichotomies. People certainly do
condemn acts like consensual incest, but we seldom ask
“compared to what?” Having loving sex with your sibling
may be more immoral than fudging your taxes, but it is likely
not as bad as perpetrating genocide. When researchers claim
that consensual incest (or eating your dead dog, or having
sex with a chicken, etc.) is immoral, they are implicitly making homogeneous the entire moral sphere, as if there is only
one level of morality. The same homogenizing is found in
claims of “harmlessness” (Haidt, 2001). Even if we ignore
the robust intuitive perception of harm in consensual incest,
we can still agree that, “objectively speaking,” having sex
with your sibling involves more harm (or potential harm)
than watching a movie with them, but less harm than stabbing out their eyes. When immorality and harm are seen as
continua, then the claims of moral dumbfounding are much
less impressive: acts which are somewhat harmful are somewhat immoral.
Not only do acts vary on their moral severity, they also
vary on how typical they are in everyday life. Morality
evolved to guide our everyday interpersonal interactions and
facilitate cooperation (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010), and yet moral
psychology has thousands of citations to papers with bizarre
moral acts such as frozen-chicken-sex, masturbating with
kittens, eating dead dogs, selling your soul, getting a plastic
surgery tail, and doing performance art that involves rolling
around in urine (Eibach et al., 2009; Haidt, 2001; Haidt &
Hersh, 2001; Helzer & Pizarro, 2011). We suggest that these
weird and ambiguous acts do not best reveal the nature of
moral cognition (Gray, 2014; Gray & Keeney, 2015a, 2015b).
Building a model of moral judgment based upon bizarre
acts such as consensual incest and chicken-sex is like building a model of mammals based upon the platypus. These
bizarre scenarios are certainly interesting, but—like platypuses—are so precisely because they are unrepresentative of
their broader category. The vast majority of immoral acts in
daily life are uncontroversially harmful such as causing
someone physical or emotional injury, denying someone
their rights, treating someone unfairly, and betraying someone’s confidence (Hofmann et al., 2014). It is these more
typical, harmful acts which should be the focus of the field,
at least if we want our theories to apply to the real world. We
should resist a “platypus moral psychology.”
What About Other Values? They Are
Transformations and Intermediaries of
Harm
Although direct physical or emotional harm is most powerfully and universally immoral, people moralize values
including purity, loyalty, honesty, industriousness, benevolence, and rationality (Haidt, 2007; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes,
2013; Rai & Fiske, 2011; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987). The
importance of these values varies from culture to culture, as
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does their moral status (Rai & Fiske, 2011). For example,
conservatives appear to moralize obedience to authority
more than liberals (Frimer, Gaucher, & Schaefer, 2014;
Stenner, 2005), and liberals moralize the purity of the environment more so than conservatives (Frimer, Tell, & Haidt,
2015).
Past research has misinterpreted dyadic morality as
opposing pluralism (Graham et al., 2013), but nothing could
be further from the truth: Dyadic morality embraces diverse
norms and cultural variability in moral judgment. However,
TDM suggests that harm—perceived, intuitive, and dyadic—
is integral to moralization, and that values are moralized to
the extent that they are associated with harm. Central to this
idea is a conceptual distinction between values and morality;
people hold numerous values, but not all are moralized.
Consider punctuality. Many individuals in industrialized
countries believe it is important to arrive on time, a view not
uniformly shared by those in developing countries. However,
even industrialized countries reveal wide variation based
upon culture and context: if an American tells you to arrive at
8:00 a.m. for an interview, you shouldn’t be a minute late,
but if a Spaniard tells you that a party starts at 8:00 p.m., you
might arrive closer to 10:00 p.m. Despite the pluralism of
this value, punctuality is not necessarily a moral value.
Showing up late for an interview is foolish, but not worthy of
moral condemnation. In cases where punctuality is moralized—showing up late to your daughter’s wedding or failing
to mail your child’s college application on time—it is because
of the harm caused by such tardiness. Admittedly, such harm
is small compared with that of murder, but such relative differences are consistent with a continuum of harm, and with
TDM, which suggests that values will be moralized to the
extent that they involve perceived harm.
Values and Norms
Earlier, we suggested that morality involves three components: norms, negative affect, and harm. Values share psychological similarities to norms, an idea supported by their
parallel definitions. Schwartz (1999) defined values as “conceptions of the desirable that guide the way social actors . . .
select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their
actions and evaluations” (p. 24), and Cialdini et al. (1991)
defined injunctive norms as “rules or beliefs as to what constitutes morally approved and disapproved conduct” (p.
1015). Equating values to norms allows us to understand
when they should be moralized—when their violation generates negative affect, and is perceived as harmful.
It is uncontroversial that the violation of norms or values
induces negative feelings (Brauer & Chaurand, 2010; Brauer
& Chekroun, 2005), but the role of harm in moralization of
diverse values is more contentious. We suggest this controversy stems from past research that conflates values with
moralization. MFT suggests there are five specific values
Schein and Gray
Figure 4. Dyadic morality suggests that negative norm violations
are moralized to the extent that they involve perceived harm.
As important values can be understood as norms, dyadic
morality allows moral pluralism through the variability of norms
across culture. Values are moralized to the extent that they are
intuitively bound to harm.
(harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity) which are
intrinsically moralized—although only some people have
these values “activated” through cultural learning. This idea
of intrinsically moralized values has difficulty explaining
how people can understand—and even hold—these values
without moralizing them. For example, even liberal professors recognize the importance for children (and their graduate students) to respect their authority, but may not moralize
it to the same degree as conservatives.
It is also problematic to restrict the set of moralized norms
to a specific number, as it fails to capture how people moralize hundreds of other values such as security, self-direction,
achievement, power, or hedonism (Schwartz & Bilsky,
1987). Recent research has even found that rationality is a
moral value for some individuals (Stahl, Zaal, & Skitka,
2016). One could argue that the diversity of moralized norms
boils down to this subset of five or six, but one could then
argue that these five boil down further—perhaps to concerns
about harm.
Harm Moralizes Norms
Once we separate values from morality, we can ask what distinguishes moral values from nonmoral values (see Figure 4).
This is analogous to the question of what distinguishes moral
norms from nonmoral norms, and we provide the same
answer as we did earlier: harm. Violations of values seem
immoral when they seem harmful—when harm is understood
as dyadic, perceived, intuitive, and continuous. Linking the
moralization of values to harm provides a domain-general
15
ingredient that can be applied to any value, not just a narrow
subset.
Of course, some values may be more or less easily tied to
harm—often because of evolutionary considerations—and
are therefore more or less easily moralized. The value of protecting the lives of your children is clearly tied to harm (A →
P), and so it is robustly moralized. In contrast, the value of
chastity is less clearly tied to harm, and so moral disagreement surrounds this value. Importantly, disagreement does
not surround ratings of chastity per se, as most people appreciate that teenage sex violates the value of chastity. Rather,
the disagreement is about whether the value of chastity is a
moral value, which we suggest is tantamount to the question
of whether violations of chastity seem harmful. Consistent
with this idea, moral opponents of teenaged sex argue that
violating chastity leads to diseases, destroys teens’ ability for
emotional intimacy, and damages their morality (Fullinwider,
1994).
In line with TDM, research reveals that perceptions of
harm predict moral judgments concerning other values. In
one study, moral condemnation of purity scenarios (e.g., rolling around in urine, selling your soul; Graham & Haidt,
2012) was predicted by perceptions of harm (r = .70; Gray &
Keeney, 2015b). In another study, moral condemnation of
GMOs—hypothesized to be purity-related (Scott et al.,
2016)—was best predicted by perceived harm (Gray &
Schein, 2016). Indeed, perceptions of harm accounted for 30
times the variance than did feelings of disgust—despite past
predictions regarding the unique link between disgust and
purity (Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009). We
acknowledge that these ratings are self-report and correlational, but this study nonetheless suggests that the people
who view GMOs as harmful are also the ones who view it as
a moral value.
The predictive power of harm regarding GMOs is even
more striking when you focus upon so-called “moral absolutists.” These are participants who state that they would be
opposed to GMOs no matter what the benefits, and so—the
authors hypothesized—should moralize purity independently from any link to harm (Scott et al., 2016). However,
these “moral absolutists” were even more likely to tie their
moral condemnation of GMOs to perceptions of harm versus
disgust (Gray & Schein, 2016).
Perhaps the strongest evidence for the intuitive link
between harm and the moralization of values comes from a
study that used an implicit association test. In this study
(Schein & Gray, 2015; Study 7a), participants categorized
words as either Immoral or Not Immoral. The Not Immoral
words were forget, procrastinate, and boring, and the
Immoral words all tapped violations of the value of “purity”:
incest, bestiality, and prostitution. Participants also categorized words as either Harmful (victim, harmful, and dangerous) or Disloyal (disloyal, unfaithful, and unpatriotic). Past
research argues that the purity is part of a “binding moral
16
foundation” which includes loyalty. This suggests that the
more impure acts are seen as immoral, the more closely they
should be linked to loyalty. Conversely, dyadic morality predicts that the more impurity seems immoral, the more impurity should be linked to harm. Consistent with dyadic
morality, the more that people moralized the value of purity,
the more they tied its violation to harm over loyalty—with
no differences across politics. In other words, across both
liberals and conservatives, it was the association with harm
that best predicted whether purity was seen as a moral
concern.
Taxonomies and Intermediaries of Harm
Harm can predict the moralization of diverse values because
the dyadic template allows for different transformations of
harm, depending on contexts and cultures. Like origami,
moralized values involve transformations of harm—not
through folding, but through flexibility in who is identified
as agents and patients, and what is identified as a damaging
act. For example, impure acts can involve damage to the
body, the future self, the soul, or society, and the more salient
this perceived damage, the more robust these acts are
moralized.
One question is what happens if people moralize values in
themselves? For example, some people decry freedom as a
good in itself (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012).
We predict that the moralization of these abstract values are
still tied to harm, and that these values are intermediaries of
harm. By intermediary, we are referring to a concept (e.g.,
purity) that is seen as a vulnerable entity in its own right. For
example, in explaining the immorality of a purity violation
such as a widow eating “hot” food, one of Shweder’s Indian
participants noted that the act not only impacts her deceased
husbands spirit (a direct harm), but the act will lead her to
“lose her sanctity” (i.e., harm her purity), a consequence that
in turn leads to her tangible suffering (Shweder et al., 1987,
p. 44). Dyadic morality therefore allows for two links to
harm: the direct perception that an act is harmful, and the
indirect perception that an act destroys a value—which then
causes direct harm. This prediction is currently untested, but
is easy to evaluate: for example, do conservatives intuitively
perceive harm when “loyalty” is violated?
Dyadic morality embraces moral diversity across cultures
and the importance of moral values, but is so far silent upon
which exact values are embraced by a culture. There are
other theories, however, that catalog these values, including
MFT (Haidt, 2007), Relationship Regulation Model (Rai &
Fiske, 2011), and the Model of Moral Motives (MMM;
Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013). These taxonomies serve an
important role because they provide intuitive categories for
moral diversity and facilitate moral discussions (Graham
et al., 2013; Rai & Fiske, 2011). Most consistent with dyadic
morality is the MMM (Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013),
which divides moral content into six cells depending on the
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identity of the moral patient (future self; other; group) and
whether harm is being perpetrated or prevented.
Regardless of one’s favored taxonomy, we caution against
confusing taxonomic groups with cognitive natural kinds
(Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, & Barrett, 2013). Describing the
language of values in anthropological accounts, on Twitter or
in Congress is valuable, but cannot reveal the structure of
moral cognition any more than text analyses of Rolling Stone
can reveal the structure of musical cognition. Moreover,
“naming is not explaining” (Gawronski & Bodenhausen,
2015, p. 18): giving a set of moral violations an intuitive
label does not automatically reveal the deep roots of moral
cognition. For example, when MFT ascribes political disagreement about sex education to differences in the importance of “purity,” it does not explain the cause of this debate.
Instead, it merely repackages it into a tautology because
purity is defined as moral concerns about sex and religion. In
other words, MFT suggests that debates about the morality of
sex are due to differences about the morality of sex. Because
these tautological labels furnish the illusion of explanation,
they disguise the complex combination of factors underpinning moral conflict, such as religiosity, historical accident,
and competing perceptions of harm (Schein & Gray, 2016).
Dyadic morality thus does not seek to name moral disagreement, but instead to explain it. It suggests a simple
answer to the question of which values a society moralizes:
those associated with harm.
Changing Harm, Changing Moralized Values
Dyadic morality also helps explain why moralized values
differ between cultures and over time (Schein & Gray 2016;
2017). Changing perceptions of harm parallel changes in
these values, as the value of sexual purity clearly illustrates.
In the ancient world, an act such as masturbation was not
only permitted, but sometimes even celebrated because it
was thought to increase fertility and strength (Laqueur,
2004). Masturbation only became the subject of moral outrage during the Enlightenment because of changing perceptions of harm. In the early 1700s, an anonymous author
published the pamphlet “Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self
Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences . . . ” (Laqueur,
2004). The pamphlet had widespread international distribution, and ignited moral panic.3 Masturbation lost its moral
tinge with the normalization of sex (Kinsey, Pomeroy,
Martin, & Sloan, 1948) and the awareness of the countervailing harm of sexual shaming (Day, 2013).
Cultural variations of perceived harm may sometimes
seem mysterious but are sensible once we consider a people’s evolutionary and cultural environment (Asch, 1952;
Douglas, 1966; Rachels, 1986). For example, cultures see
sexual promiscuity as harmful when the prevalence of sexually transmitted infection is high (Tybur, Lieberman,
Kurzban, & DeScioli, 2013), or see disloyalty as harmful
when cultures face annihilation in warfare (Gelfand et al.,
17
Schein and Gray
Questions of how exactly norms and affect are psychologically instantiated are beyond the scope of this article, but are
reviewed in moral psychology (Haidt, 2003; Sripada & Stich,
2005) and in nonmoral psychology (L. F. Barrett & Russell,
2014; Bicchieri, 2005). Indeed, we suggest that nonmoral
psychology is an excellent guide for how we make moral
judgments.
Making Nonmoral Judgments
Figure 5. The complementary causal processes of dyadic
comparison and dyadic completion. Norm violations that
are perceived as harmful are morally condemned (dyadic
comparison), and once condemned, these acts are perceived as
more harmful (dyadic completion).
2011). Of course, perceptions of harm—like beauty or any
other cultural product—are also affected by stochastic factors that result in random drift and arbitrary differences
between cultures. As with evolutionary drift, random variation in perceived harm (and morality) may then be exapted to
serve a useful function, such as binding cultures together
around shared but arbitrary judgments (A. P. Fiske, 2000;
Greene, 2013).
In sum, dyadic morality suggests that harm separates the
moral from the nonmoral, whether it concerns acts or values.
The role of harm in mapping out moral content is provided
by the mechanism of moral judgment.
Mechanism
Questions of what are inextricably bound to questions of
how. In the content section, we have suggested that dyadic
harm is central to morality. In this section on mechanism, we
explore the processes by which perceptions of harm shape—
and are shaped by—moral judgment. We review the complementary dynamic processes of dyadic comparison and dyadic
completion, and the dyadic loop that their combination yields
(see Figure 5). We then discuss broader debates about the
mind—modularity versus constructionism—and how they
impact moral psychology. We conclude by examining moral
emotions and disgust.
Although these discussions focus upon mechanisms of
harm, we again acknowledge the importance of norms and
negative affect in constructing morality. Harm-based processes of moral judgment are likely initialized only once a
norm violation is noticed, and the strength of the final moral
judgment hinges on its associated negative affect, which is
typically integral or related to an act (Wisneski & Skitka,
2017) but can also be generated through incidental manipulations (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; though see
Landy & Goodwin, 2015; Johnson et al., 2016).
Importantly, as dyadic acts (e.g., murder) are often intrinsically negative norm violations, these factors are somewhat—but not fully—contained within the moral dyad.
Moral judgments are unique in their severity, conviction, and
implications (Skitka et al., 2005; Skitka et al., 2015), and so
it is tempting to treat moral mechanisms as equally special.
Despite the appeal of searching for the “morality” region in
the brain that automatically categorizes moral violations
(Derbyshire, 2010), a decade of research suggests that no
single, specific region exists (Greene & Haidt, 2002; Young
& Dungan, 2012). Rather, research reveals that moral judgments involve the same domain-general cognitive processes
and brain regions used in other decision-making paradigms
(Cushman & Young, 2011; Van Bavel et al., 2015; Miller &
Cushman, in press). We therefore suggest that moral judgments are made similar to nonmoral judgments, and that asking people “Is x act immoral,” is analogous to asking “Is y
animal a mammal?” or “Is z person African American?” All
three involve categorization, asking whether a specific
example is representative of a category or concept.
Categorization has been heavily studied in cognitive psychology (Medin, Wattenmaker, & Hampson, 1987; Murphy,
2004), and although researchers disagree on some details,
there is widespread consensus on how these decisions are
made—and not made. Categorizations are not made with
strict verbal definitions containing a list of necessary and
sufficient conditions (Wittgenstein, 1953). Although this
idea was historically popular, it fell out of fashion as philosophers and psychologists realized its inability to capture the
gradient (or continuum) of categorization—how some examples can be better (e.g., horses) or worse (e.g., platypuses)
examples of a category (e.g., mammals; Medin, 1989).
Categorization decisions are also not made with modules—
encapsulated and innate mechanisms (Sperber, 1994)—as
modules are too rigid to account for contextual effects and
variations in categorization (Fodor, 1985). While the strict
assumptions of modularity can be relaxed, we will later argue
that weak modularity lacks falsifiability, and only furnishes
the illusion of explanation.
Rather than involving definitions and modules, research
reveals that categorization decisions are made by comparing
examples to cognitive templates (Rosch, 1978). These templates are synthetic constructions that combine the most
important, salient, and typical features of category members.
For instance, in “birds,” this template contains the element of
feathers, flight, and beaks; in “African American,” this template contains elements of skin tone, facial features, dress,
speech, and socioeconomic status. Templates can be thought
18
of as either a single prototype (Rosch, 1978), or a set of
exemplars (E. E. Smith & Medin, 2002), but the important
point is that they synthesize features.
Categorization decisions are then made by comparing
examples—rapidly and intuitively—to this synthetic template, with better matches resulting in more robust categorization decisions. This explains why a robin is a “better” bird
(i.e., more bird like) than an ostrich, and a golden retriever is
a “better” dog than a Puli. Literally hundreds of studies in
cognition and social cognition support this mechanism of
categorization in nonmoral judgment (Rosch, 1978; E. E.
Smith & Medin, 1981; Taylor, 2003). We suggest that such
“template comparison” also operates within morality.
How Do We Make Moral Judgments?
Through Dyadic Comparison and
Direct Learning
Dyadic morality suggests that moral judgments are typically
made via template comparison with a dyadic cognitive template (A→P). That is, moral judgment occurs via dyadic
comparison, with more dyadic acts being judged as “more
immoral.” Dyadic comparison can be captured by the phrase
the more something seems harmful, the more it seems
immoral.
The process of template comparison in nonmoral judgment is revealed by several phenomena: a continuum of categorization judgments, a continuum of categorization speed,
and a continuum of categorization accessibility—each of
which is predicted by the template features. Studies reveal
that the same is true in moral judgment, with a dyadic template predicting the phenomena of moral judgment.
Evidence for Dyadic Template Comparison
A continuum of judgments. Categorization decisions exist
along a continuum between obvious members and obvious
nonmembers, with the level of categorization predicted by
how much an example matches the template (Rosch, 1978).
In morality, the more dyadic an act, the more it should be
judged as immoral. In other words, more harmful acts should
be (cognitively speaking) “better” examples of the concept
of immorality. Consistent with this idea, experimental tests
that manipulate the presence of harm find that perceptions of
harm predict the severity of moral judgments (Schein &
Gray, 2015).
In a different study, we asked participants to rate the
harmfulness, disgustingness, weirdness, and immorality of a
variety of harmful and disgusting acts, and found that across
actions, the perception of harm was the best predictor of
immorality ratings, even when controlling for disgust and
weirdness (Schein, Ritter, & Gray, 2016). Moreover, increasing the salience of each dyadic element—intention, causation, and suffering—all increase the strength of perceived
harm and moral condemnation (Ames & Fiske, 2013;
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Cushman, 2008; Cushman et al., 2006; Jenni & Loewenstein,
1997; Malle, 2006; Malle et al., 2014; J. W. Martin &
Cushman, 2016b; Young, Cushman, Hauser, & Saxe, 2007).
Although many of these studies rely on tasks that allow for
deliberative thinking, they also rely on between-subjects
designs, where participants are presumably unaware that the
researchers are manipulating elements of the vignettes (e.g.,
Ames & Fiske, 2013).
A continuum of speed. With nonmoral judgment, examples
that better match the category template are not only more
robustly categorized as category members but are also more
quickly categorized (Rosch, 1978). The same continuum of
categorization speed exists in morality. In one study, we
gave participants a speeded reaction time task, in which
they were asked to categorize 60 different acts on their
immorality, harmfulness, and unpleasantness (Schein et al.,
2015). Consistent with predictions, we found that, for both
liberals and conservatives, the more harmful the act, the
more quickly it was categorized as immoral, even when
controlling for general negativity (see Figure 3; Schein
et al., 2015).
A continuum of accessibility. Cognitive science also reveals
that category examples which best match the template are
most accessible. If you tell someone to think of a mammal,
they mention “dog” more often than “platypus.” We tested
the accessibility of moral acts by asking 100 Mturk participants to “list an act that is morally wrong. Write down whatever comes to mind first.” Results reveal that—for both
liberals and conservatives—more than 90% of the recalled
acts were dyadic, such as murder, stealing, adultery, or abuse
(Schein & Gray, 2015).
A Causal Connection?
There is clearly a connection between an act’s perceived
harmfulness (A→P) and the moral condemnation it engenders. However, one question is whether this association is
correlational or causal. Perhaps acts are judged as immoral
based on some other criteria, and judgments of immorality
subsequently evoke matching perceptions of harm. As we
will see, moral judgments do cause perceptions of harm—
via dyadic completion—but harm is also causally connected to moral judgment, as recent experiments in our lab
reveal.
In this set of studies (Hester et al., 2017), participants were
presented with nonsense actions taken from linguistics research,
such as John gished Mary. Given that these actions are not
intrinsically immoral (or even meaningful), the only source of
moral condemnation is their surrounding context. Across studies, we manipulated the presence of a dyadic context (John
gished Mary vs. John gished), the presence of intention (John
intentionally gished Mary vs. John accidentally gished Mary),
and the presence of suffering (John gished Mary, who cried vs.
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Schein and Gray
John gished Mary, who laughed). Consistent with TDM, the
addition of a dyadic context, intention, and suffering, all caused
increased moral condemnation—all without a specific moral
act. Importantly, sentences were read and judged under time
pressure, suggesting it was intuitive perception of harm causing
intuitive moral judgments.
One challenge to the causal role of harm comes from the
idea that acts can be directly learned as immoral without
invoking harm. Studies with children reveal that while they
do learn morality through experience with harm (Blair,
1995; Nucci, Turiel, & Encarnacion-Gawrych, 1983), adults
also seem to teach children that some acts are “just wrong.”
Direct learning from parental testimony occurs in morality
(Rottman et al., 2015)—and in many other categories
(Gelman, 2009; Harris, 2015)—but children do not blindly
accept all testimony equally (Koenig, Clément, & Harris,
2004). With morality, past research suggests that children
are most likely to moralize actions which innately evoke
empathy or outrage (Blair, 1995)—that is, those involving
harm (Rottman et al., 2015).
Parents also often infuse moral testimony with harm, such
as when religious parents condemn masturbation by linking
it to angels dying or Jesus crying. This co-occurrence is
effective because, as initial studies reveal, moralization—the
transformation of an issue from nonmoral to immoral (Rozin,
1999)—is most robust via harm (Rottman et al., 2015).
Strikingly, even ostensibly harmless norms can be moralized
through harm-based testimony, as revealed by a series of
studies in which 7-year-old children were presented with
novel actions (e.g., someone “covering their heads with
sticks”). When children were told that arbitrary actions were
harmful, they judged them as immoral, even 3 months later
(Rottman et al., 2015).
The causal power of harm in moral acquisition allows
for moral learning, and also suggests which moralized
norms are most likely to persist intuitively—those most
robustly tied to harm. While children (and adults) can be
told that any act is immoral, TDM suggests that acts remain
intuitively immoral to the extent that they are intuitively
associated with harm, even if such intuitions of harm defy
“objective” reasoning. The causal role of intuitive harm is
also supported by research on psychopaths, who can both
learn norms and feel negative affect, but whose lack of intuitive empathy to others’ suffering prevents them acquiring
intuitive morality (Blair, 1995).
In sum, harm both amplifies and directly causes moral
judgment, even in cases where acts seem “objectively” harmless. We acknowledge that perceptions of harm need not be
consciously considered when making moral judgment, especially with frequently encountered acts; most people just
“know” that murder and rape are immoral, just as they just
“know” that dogs are mammals. But such rote associations
do not disprove the existence of a causal cognitive template
in either case, especially when the speed and strength of
these associations remain exquisitely predicted by harm.
How Do Moral Judgments Affect
Perceptions? Through Dyadic
Completion
Cognitive templates shape “bottom-up” judgments of how
much examples represent a concept; they also shape “topdown” perceptions of those examples after those judgments
have been made (Read, Vanman, & Miller, 1997). If dyadic
comparison can be summarized as “the more something
seems harmful, the more it seems immoral,” then dyadic
completion suggests the complementary process of “the
more something seems immoral, the more it seems
harmful.”
Although the most severe immoral acts are obviously
dyadic, less obviously dyadic acts may nevertheless be categorized as somewhat immoral—whether because of rote
learning or because they are dyadic “enough” to trigger a
weak moral judgment. As in other categorization decisions,
making a moral judgment initiates an unconscious coherence
process that aligns perceptions of a specific example with the
broader conceptual template (Clark et al., 2015; Thagard,
2002)—which leads ambiguously dyadic acts to seem even
more dyadic. This process is called dyadic completion
because a somewhat incomplete dyad (lacking a clear agent,
patient, or causation) is “completed” by perceiving the missing agent, patient, or causation (Gray & Schein, 2012).
The presence of evil agents and suffering patients (A P)
compels causal dyadic completion, the perception of a causal
link between them. For example, a drug dealer rushing home
to hide cocaine is ascribed more causal responsibility for a
car crash than someone rushing home for a more innocuous
reason (Alicke, 1992). It is also the reason why evil CEOs
seem more causally responsible than good CEOs for harming the environment (Knobe, 2003), and why evil thoughts
seem to cause the suffering of others more than good thoughts
(Pronin et al., 2006).
Similarly, isolated suffering patients ( →P) compel agentic dyadic completion, the perception of intentional agents to
account for their suffering. This is why people blame—and
sue (Sunstein, Kahneman, & Schkade, 1998)—individuals
(Knobe, 2003), corporations (Stout, 2013), God (Gall, 2004;
Gray & Wegner, 2010a), and even animals (Oldridge, 2004)
after accidents and natural disasters. Our studies reveal that
the experience of suffering on both a small and large national
scale prompts belief in an intentional God (Gray & Wegner,
2010a).
Perhaps the most important form of dyadic completion is
patientic dyadic completion in which norm violations completed by intentional agents (A→ ) compel people to see
moral patients harmed by those acts (DeScioli, Gilbert, &
Kurzban, 2012; Gray, Young et al., 2012; Gray, Schein, &
Ward, 2014). Research finds that people even see suffering in
events which one could argue are “objectively” harmless,
such as burning an American flag, eating a dead dog, grave
desecration, and homosexuality (DeScioli et al., 2012).
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Given the vulnerability of children, dyadic completion
often activates perceptions of the suffering of children.
Indeed, “Think of the Children” is a catchphrase for moral
campaigns against pornography (Pierce, 2001), for and
against gay marriage (Kennedy, 2015), transgender bathroom use (Philipps, 2016), and masturbation (Day, 2013).
Although liberals may see this harm as mere rhetoric, both
anthropological accounts (Shweder, 2012) and experimental
studies reveal these acts are legitimately perceived to have
concrete victims (Clark et al., 2015; DeScioli et al., 2012;
Gray, Schein et al., 2014).
Importantly, our own research suggests that perceptions
of harm occur automatically (Gray, Schein et al., 2014). In
one study, we primed participants with ostensibly harmless
acts such as desecrating a bible, strange masturbation, and
necrophilia, and then presented participants with images of
children, who were perceived as expressing more suffering
but not more boredom (a negative nonharm control). In a
related study, participants who had just read about burning an
American flag or having sex with a store-bought chicken
(Haidt et al., 1993) saw unrelated injuries as more painful,
but did not see Chinese pictographs as more unpleasant (a
negative control). Such automatic perceptions of harm can
help support moral acquisition by deepening moral judgments. Indeed, when 7-year-old children were taught that
arbitrary norm violations were “just wrong,” they intuitively
linked those violations to harm, which helps to entrench
them (Rottman et al., 2015).
Dyadic completion is likely the reason why people are
seldom moral absolutists. Very few people (beyond Kant,
1780) separate immorality from perceived harm and claim
that something is wrong but beneficial (Clark et al., 2015).
For example, those who think GMOs are morally permissible see them as solving problems of hunger, whereas those
who think GMOs are immoral see them as harming children
and the environment (Gray & Schein, 2016). These perceptions of harm occur automatically and intuitively (Gray,
Schein et al., 2014), but can be augmented by reasoning
(DeScioli et al., 2012). In particular, we suggest that reason
transforms general intuitions of harmfulness to the identification of specific victims, agents, or causal pathways (Clark
et al., 2015; Ditto & Liu, 2011; Liu & Ditto, 2013). Like all
perceptions of harm, this identification of dyadic elements is
sensitive to context and culture (Schein & Gray, 2016).
How Are Moral Judgments Extended
and Entrenched? Through the Dyadic
Loop
Dyadic comparison is a bottom-up process that transforms
perceived harm into judgments of immorality, and dyadic
completion is a top-down process that transforms judgments
of immorality into perceived harm. Together, these complementary processes form a feedback loop that can amplify
moral judgments as perceptions of harm and immorality
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mutually reinforce each other, a process called the dyadic
loop. Such feedback cycles are well documented in cognition
(Spivey & Dale, 2004), especially in the field of nonlinear
dynamics (Vallacher, Read, & Nowak, 2002), which would
consider the moral dyad an “attractor state” (Corneille,
Hugenberg, & Potter, 2007). This attractor state exerts cognitive gravity that pulls ambiguous acts toward it, synchronizing and amplifying judgments of harm and immorality. This
cognitive gravity can help explain the general “creep” of
immorality and harm, through which people are seen to
deserve greater rights and protection (Haslam, 2016; Schein
& Gray, 2016)—perhaps helping to explain moral progress
(Pinker, 2011).
This iterative process should not be understood as a slow
process of discrete steps (Schein & Gray, 2014). The mind
does not work in discrete chunks via boxes and arrows
(Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Spivey & Dale, 2004;
Thelen, 1996) but instead via parallel constraint satisfaction
processes through which percepts—that is, harm and immorality—mutually reinforce each other (Read et al., 1997).
This dynamic dyadic loop offers a simple explanation for the
dynamics of moralization (Schein & Gray, 2016): once a person or a community sees an act as somewhat harmful—
whether for functional reasons or randomly—that act will
seem somewhat immoral, which will make it seem more
harmful, and then more immoral, and then more harmful,
then more immoral, and so on (see Figure 6). Consider smoking or vegetarianism (Rozin, 1999; Rozin, Markwith, &
Stoess, 1997). What initially is a matter of preference can
rapidly transform to an issue of morality once some notion of
harm is introduced—especially to vulnerable moral patients
(e.g., children suffering via secondhand smoke or animals
suffering in factory farming).
The feedback cycle between harm and immorality can
also help explain moral polarization (Haidt, 2012), in which
minor disagreements between groups expand into major
moral chasms—especially when group dynamics are added
to the mix (Gray, Rand, et al., 2014). Immorality judgments
shape factual beliefs about the world (Liu & Ditto, 2013),
and so once initial perceptions of harm cause moral judgments, people then perceive the harmfulness of issues differently, such as when moral opponents of GMOs deny scientific
findings regarding their benefits (supplementary material,
Scott et al., 2016). Perceptions of harm are both the cause
and the consequence of moral disagreement, consistent with
a dynamic causal model advanced by TDM.
How Does Dyadic Morality Relate to
MFT? It Argues Against Its Claim of
Modularity
The emphasis of harm in dyadic morality puts it at odds with
MFT (Haidt, 2007). MFT argues that people have a set of
five innately prepared cognitive modules (Haidt & Joseph,
2007), one for each different kind of moral content: harm,
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Schein and Gray
which are best understood as transformations or intermediaries of harm. Conceptions of harm are also shaped by culture
learning through different informational assumptions about
mind perception, causation, and which entities are vulnerable to damage (Cohen & Rozin, 2001; Crimston et al., 2016;
Haslam, 2006; Turiel et al., 1987).
Understandings of harm are also innate (Govrin, 2014).
Before a baby can walk, they show signs of harm-based
sociomoral judgments (Bloom, 2004; Van de Vondervoort &
Hamlin, 2016), enabled through the innateness of intention
(Carey, 2009; Woodward, 1998, 2005), causation (Leslie &
Keeble, 1987), and suffering (G. B. Martin & Clark, 1982;
Simner, 1971)—all processes that emerge early in
development.
Despite these points of agreement, there remain strong
areas of contention between TDM and MFT—namely the
endorsement of constructionism or modularity.
Modularity
Figure 6. The dyadic template exerts cognitive gravity, making
moral violations seem both more harmful and more immoral via
the dyadic loop, characterized by the iterative and complementary
maxims “what seems harmful is wrong” and “what seems wrong
is harmful.” This feedback loop allows for moralization and
facilitates deepening moral polarization.
fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. For example, MFT
holds that having sex with a dead chicken is judged as
immoral via a purity module, which makes its perceived
harmfulness completely irrelevant (Haidt & Hersh, 2001).
As we reviewed above, there is ample recent evidence for
the intuitive and causal role of harm within these acts.
However, it is important to consider this debate more deeply,
as dyadic morality and moral foundations endorse competing
viewpoints about the broader nature of the human mind.
Points of Agreement
First, both TDM and MFT agree that harm can cause moral
judgment—that perceptions of intention, causation, and suffering are sufficient for moral judgment. In TDM, this is
accomplished through comparison with a dyadic template,
and in MFT, this is accomplished through the activation of an
encapsulated harm mechanism. Second, both theories agree
that harm—intentionally caused suffering—is likely the
most important, frequent, and universal moral consideration
(Haidt et al., 2015).
Third, both theories agree upon four claims set out by
MFT, that morality is intuitive, pluralistic, culturally learned,
and innate (Graham et al., 2013). TDM embraces all four of
these criteria: both morality and harm are intuitive, and are
also compatible with pluralism via diverse moralized values,
Dyadic morality and moral foundations are grounded in different views of the mind. MFT explicitly endorses modularity, in which different mental events are tied to the operation
of different cognitive modules, defined by MFT as follows:
Modules are like little switches in the brains of all animals. They
are switched on by patterns that were important for survival in a
particular ecological niche, and when they detect that pattern,
they send out a signal that (eventually) changes the animal’s
behavior in a way that is (usually) adaptive. (Haidt, 2012, p. 123)
This definition reflects a “strong” claim of modularity, in
which modules are cognitive mechanisms distinct from each
other in terms of inputs, activation, and outputs. This feature
of distinctness is essential to modular claims because they
allow for causal claims: a specific subset of stimuli (e.g.,
kind of moral violations) activates one certain module (e.g.,
purity foundation) which causes one certain behavior or
experience (e.g., purity-related moral judgment).
Reinforcing this strong modular view are analogies
between moral foundations and taste buds, each of which are
biologically distinct, triggered by a specific set of food
chemicals, and linked to one specific psychological experience (e.g., a taste of sweetness, or saltiness; Haidt, 2012).
The very act of naming moral concerns “foundations” (vs.
genres) emphasizes the idea that these five moral concerns
are reified as distinct mechanisms, as does the claim that
modules are “little switches in the brain.”
Testing Strong Modularity
Claims of strong modularity have two large benefits: explanation and falsifiability. By grounding phenomena in the
activation of distinct functional mechanisms, modules allow
these phenomena to be explained. When someone asks “why
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Figure 7. MFT argues for a set of isomorphic mechanisms, in which a specific moral scenario activate a distinct moral foundation—
defined as a cognitive module (i.e., “little switch in the brain”; Haidt, 2012, p. 123)—which is tied to a distinct emotion. However,
empirical data reveals little to no distinctness between concerns, as harm and purity are highly correlated at r > .87 (Gray & Keeney,
2015b), and are not tied to distinct emotions (Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray, 2015). The pervasive role of harm across morality is
consistent with dyadic morality.
Note. MFT = Moral Foundations Theory.
does a peach taste sweet?” we can say “because sugar
(C6H12O6) binds with the ‘sweet’ taste bud.” Distinct modular moral foundations—if present—would also allow us to
explain moral judgment. When someone asks “why does
someone think consensual incest is immoral?” we can say
“because incest activates the ‘impurity’ foundation.” Strong
modules also allow falsifiability because it is relatively easy
to test claims of distinctness and specificity.
Testing distinctness. To test distinctness, one can assess
whether the psychological experience ostensibly tied to one
module is independent from that of a different module. With
taste buds, putting sugar on the tongue (an input) activates
“sweetness,” but does not trigger the experience of saltiness,
and so we can call them distinct. Testing such distinctness in
MFT may be difficult, as acts could activate more than one
module (e.g., romantic cheating activates loyalty and harm),
but thankfully, MFT researchers have designed a bank of
scenarios (Graham & Haidt, 2012; Graham et al., 2009;
Haidt et al., 1993) custom-designed to tap only one “foundation.” These scenarios thus represent the MFT equivalent of
pure salt and pure sugar; the question is whether the judgments they activate are actually distinct.
The answer is no. Across multiple studies, there is no evidence for distinctness when using these custom scenarios
(Gray & Keeney, 2015b; Gray, Schein et al., 2014; Schein &
Gray, 2015). In MFT discussions, purity and harm are often
cast as maximally distinct (Haidt, 2001; Horberg et al.,
2009), and yet their judgments are highly overlapping, with
correlations greater than .87 between them (Gray & Keeney,
2015b). Other foundations are similarly highly overlapping,
with the ratings of all 5 "foundations" often forming a single
scale, α = .89 (Study 5; Schein & Gray, 2015). Most strikingly, although MFT researchers have designed the Moral
Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham et al., 2011) to
illustrate the distinctness of moral domains, it actually
reveals the opposite, with correlations of .88 between authority and loyalty, .72 between harm and fairness, and .80
between purity and authority (Figure 3; Graham et al., 2011).
These correlations make claims of distinct mechanisms all
but impossible, especially considering that these interfoundation correlations are higher than the intrafoundation reliabilities (i.e., loyalty is more correlated with authority than
with itself). See Figure 7.
To make this lack of distinctness explicit, consider again
the MFT analogy of taste buds (Haidt, 2012). If taste buds
were as nondistinct as moral foundations, then even pure
sugar would taste sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami—and
so would pure salt. These empirical results suggest that while
MFT may be a convenient taxonomy of overlapping values,
it certainly does not capture a set of innate moral "taste buds"
or cognitive mechanisms.
We acknowledge that some studies do reveal some apparent differences in moral judgments across content areas, but
these findings are problematic. For example, studies arguing
for a special link between purity and character (Uhlmann &
Zhu, 2013; Young & Saxe, 2011) confound purity with
weirdness when they use bizarre scenarios. When participant-generated examples of impurity (e.g., pornography,
prostitution) are used to eliminate these confounds, any
apparent differences disappear (Gray & Keeney, 2015b).
Testing moral emotions—Especially disgust. Another key claim
of modularity is that specific "basic" emotions are linked to
distinct moral foundations, such as purity to disgust, and
harm to anger (Horberg et al., 2009). However, recent experiments and a review of the literature found no evidence for
such morality-emotion specificity (Cameron, Lindquist, &
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Schein and Gray
a causal impact on immorality when controlling for harm.
Indeed, past work has linked dyadic elements to dimensions
of moral emotions, with anger and disgust tied to viewing
immoral agents, and sympathy and sadness tied to viewing
victims (Gray & Wegner, 2011c).
The Weakness of Weak Modularity
Figure 8. Two competing predictions about the mediational
structure of harm, disgust, and moral judgment. “Direct disgust”
argues that disgust directly causes moral judgments, with
perceptions of harm only rationalizing these judgments (Haidt &
Hersh, 2001). Dyadic morality argues that harm most proximately
predicts immorality. Despite the long-standing popularity of
the “direct disgust” hypothesis, research using a broad sample
of disgusting stimuli reveals more support for dyadic morality:
ratings of harm mediate the link between disgust and immorality,
even in “objectively harmless” purity violations (Schein, Ritter, &
Gray, 2016).
Gray, 2015; Cheng et al., 2013; Kayyal, Pochedly, McCarthy, & Russell, 2015; Royzman, Atanasov, Landy, Parks, &
Gepty, 2014; Schein, Ritter, & Gray, 2016). Instead, the
appearance of specificity arises from the lack of appropriate
control conditions and statistical procedures that obscure
overlap (e.g., ANCOVA; Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray, 2015)
One additional long-standing claim is that “disgust and
discomfort drive moral condemnation which are later cloaked
with harm based rationalization” (Haidt & Hersh, 2001, p.
212). This suggests that disgust and not harm is the most
proximate predictor of moral judgment—especially for
ostensibly harmless “purity” acts (Figure 8). We tested this
claim in multiple mediation studies where people rated the
disgust, harmfulness, and immorality of these acts. These
studies revealed that harm statistically mediated the impact
of disgust upon moral judgments of these “harmless” acts—
often with complete mediation (Schein, Ritter, & Gray,
2016). In other words, disgusting sexual and religious violations are seen as wrong only when feelings of disgust engender perceptions of harm.
Just as perceived harm separates moralized values from
nonmoralized values, so too does it separate moralized disgust from nonmoralized disgust. Cleaning up your baby's
diarrhea and giving children tainted blood are both disgusting, but only the latter is harmful and therefore immoral. Of
course, as negative affect is one key element of immorality,
we acknowledge that emotions (including disgust) can have
We recognize that predictions of distinctness, domain- and
emotion-specificity are hallmarks of “strong” modularity and
there are weaker versions of modularity (Haidt et al., 2015).
Although MFT once claimed to be “near the maximalist side
of the [modularity] spectrum” (Graham et al., 2013, p. 99),
more recent accounts advocate for only “minimal” modularity (Haidt et al., 2015) and focus on the claim that MFT provides only “a first draft of the moral mind” (Graham et al.,
2013, p. 63). However, there are two issues with weak modularity: unfalsifiability and lack of explanation.
Unfalisifiability. A strength of strong modularity is that it
provides a clearly testable hypothesis—distinctness—and
is therefore falsifiable. Unfortunately, weak modularity
lacks this falsifiability. How can one test a mechanism that
is only metaphorical and makes no claims to separation?
Any pattern of data could be consistent with a watered
down version of MFT in which moral foundations are
merely guiding ideas rather than psychological mechanisms. Even claims of an innate “first draft of the moral
mind” shaped by cultural learning are uninformative, as literally all psychological phenomenon hinge on a combination of nature and nurture.
Especially problematic are directly contradictory claims
such as both “similarities and differences . . . between different kinds of moral judgment” (Graham, 2015, p. 872), and
that moral foundations are both “little switches in the brain”
(Haidt, 2012, p. 123), and “not spots in the brain” (Graham
et al., 2013, p. 96)—exactly opposite claims that guarantee
MFT can never be wrong, whatever the evidence. We suggest that for MFT to be useful, it must specify falsifiable predictions that go beyond the general principles of innateness,
cultural learning, intuitionism, and pluralism, especially
because these four claims are also endorsed by dyadic
morality.
Lack of explanation. The benefit of strong modularity is that
it seeks to explain phenomena through the operation of distinct mechanisms (e.g., taste buds). We acknowledge that the
existence of distinct, differentially activated moral mechanisms would help to explain moral differences across cultures—however, there is no clear evidence for their existence.
Instead, “foundations” are simply tendencies to moralize
specific content areas, which means that MFT no longer
explains moral differences but only names them (Gawronski
& Bodenhausen, 2015).
24
Imagine we defined purity as “a tendency to moralize
deviant sexuality.” This would mean that the statement “Pat
morally condemns bestiality because of purity” is equivalent
to saying that “Pat moralizes deviant sexuality because she
moralizes deviant sexuality”—a clear tautology. To be sure,
there are important differences between those who moralize
sexuality and those who don’t—including religion and conservativism—but simply naming them “purity” obscures any
deeper explanation and impedes future research. We suggest
that the field should move past these tautological labels and
explore the fundamental cognitive and cultural determinants
of moral differences.
What Are Moral Foundations?
Although we have criticized much research on modularity
and MFT, we suggest that there is a place for moral foundations in the field. However, we stress that empirical evidence
suggests that MFT does not describe “foundations”—deep
and reified causal mechanisms—but instead genres, similar
to music genres. These genres can help catalog and describe
the diversity of moral content across cultures and contexts,
and hence still retain some “pragmatic utility” (Graham
et al., 2013). Unfortunately, even these genres may suffer
from problems of construct validity. Not only are harm, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity highly correlated with
each other (Schein & Gray, 2015) but they also have questionable divergent validity from scales like Social Dominance
Orientation and Right Wing Authoritarianism (Jost, 2012;
Kugler, Jost, & Noorbaloochi, 2014).
One issue is that the items used to assess MFT have conflated conservativism and morality from the very beginning
(Graham & Haidt, 2012). Claims that only conservatives are
concerned with purity are based upon items tapping sex and
religion—two issues long linked to conservatism. However,
liberals do seem to care about purity-type concerns such as
vaccines and the environment (Frimer et al., 2015), and the
sanctity of liberal heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr.
(Haidt, 2012). Similarly, classifying liberals as individualists and conservatives as collectivists (Haidt, 2007) does not
apply to many important issues (Frimer, Tell, & Motyl,
2016) such as gun rights (conservatives are individualistic)
and taxation (liberals are collectivist). Thus, it is unclear
whether measures such as the MFQ reveal new knowledge
about individual differences in morality or simply repackage a subset of well-known political differences with pithy
names.
Also problematic is that MFQ (Graham et al., 2011) uses
explicit self-perceptions concerning moral judgment (i.e.,
“to what extent are the following considerations relevant to
your thinking?”), and not the moral judgments themselves.
Pioneering work by Haidt (2001) suggested that these
explicit self-perceptions do not reliably represent moral
cognition, and other work suggests that these responses are
subject to exaggeration (Graham, Nosek, & Haidt, 2012).
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MFT scenarios tapping moral judgment also confound
moral content with weirdness and severity (Gray & Keeney,
2015b), undermining their utility as general-purpose moral
questionnaires.
In sum, although the MFQ may be easy to add to studies,
researchers would be wise to consider MFT's theoretical and
methodological limitations before using its conceptual
framework and associated measures—especially when other
taxonomies are available (e.g., Janoff-Bulman & Carnes,
2013; Schwartz, 1999).
Is There an Alternative to Modularity?
Yes: Constructionism
In contrast to the modular account of morality, dyadic morality denies the existence of natural moral kinds and isomorphic mechanisms—specific cognitive “switches,” one for
each kind of moral content (Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray,
2015). Instead, TDM suggests that moral content represents
varieties of perceived harm. Such variations may be descriptively different—and usefully taxonomized—but are not
ontologically distinct because they are made from a common
set of core ingredients. Rather than modularity, dyadic morality is inspired by a very different model of the mind: constructionism (L. F. Barrett, 2013).
Constructionism suggests that psychological phenomena
emerge from the combination of more basic ingredients,
rather than through the operation of distinct mechanisms. As
an analogy, consider baked goods (L. F. Barrett, 2009).
Croissants, scones, and pancakes each taste and look different, but they all involve various combinations of the same
basic ingredients (e.g., flour, sugar, baking powder, salt). In
morality, constructionism means that different moralized
concerns (e.g., loyalty, purity) consist of various combinations of norms, affect, and perceived harm.
For the sake of argument, imagine that—across cultures—
there were five different varieties of agents (e.g., gods,
adults, groups), 20 different varieties of acts (e.g., hitting,
insulting, defiling), and 15 different varieties of vulnerable
patient (e.g., children, adults, animals, souls, social order).
When multiplied together, this number would give the possibility for 1,500 varieties of moral judgment—and we
haven’t even yet considered the nuances of norms.4 In other
words, a synthetic, constructionist understanding of morality
offers a combinatorial explosion cultural diversity.
The constructionist roots of TDM rebuffs criticisms that
we wish to replace four, five, or six modules with a single
neurally instantiated module of harm (Sinnott-Armstrong,
2016). Instead we argue for emergence in which a small subset of lower level ingredients can combine to yield diversity
at higher levels of analyses. Emergence is more consistent
with modern understandings of the evolution of the human
mind than is modularity, because emergence is more neurally
efficient (L. F. Barrett & Russell, 2014). Thousands of varieties of human mental experiences need not require thousands
25
Schein and Gray
Figure 9. A “Theory Map” of the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (see Gray, in press). Moral judgment emerges from
combining varieties of three basic ingredients: Norms, affect, and harm. Harm itself is also constructed of an agent, patient, and a
causal damaging act. Each of these features has numerous varieties, allowing for moral diversity. (For more on theory maps, see www.
theorymaps.org).
of separate little mental switches, but instead can be made
with a small set of domain-general neural networks.
A geometric analogy helps to capture the difference
between modularity and constructionism. Modularity is represented by arrows that go from one moral module to one
moral concern. In contrast to the arrow, constructionism is
illustrated by overlapping circles (think Venn diagrams) in
which mental states emerge from the combination of other
elements (Gray, Schein, & Cameron, in press). In this case,
morality emerges from the overlap of norms, affect, and
harm, with harm itself emerging from the overlap of agents,
patients, and causation.
This emergence is illustrated in Figure 9 through a “theory map” of dyadic morality (Gray, in press). Elements
within the } symbol combine (i.e., overlap) to form the construct to which they point: norms, affect, and harm make
immorality; agents, patients, and causation make harm.
Varieties of each element are highlighted (e.g., anger and disgust are both forms of negative affect), with the most prototypical variety of each underlined (e.g., children are the most
prototypical moral patient). Associations between these
elements and various other constructs are also illustrated to
situate dyadic morality within the broader framework of
moral psychology.
Implications
Beyond suggesting a new perspective on the moral mind,
dyadic morality has specific implications for understanding
moral character, political discourse, “moral” harms, and
cross-cultural dialogue.
Character
Moral psychology has long focused on the immorality of
action, but many argue for importance of global, personcentric moral evaluations—judgments of moral character
(Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011). At first glance, moral character research might seem to contradict dyadic morality
(Pizarro et al., 2012), such as when people assign worse
moral character to a cat-beater than a woman-beater, despite
the fact that the act of woman-beating is worse (Tannenbaum,
26
Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011). However, dyadic morality
predicts that moral character is ultimately about someone’s
general capacity for harmful norm violations, and as the
authors of this study suggest, cat-beating suggests a more
disturbing ability for these actions in general. Consistent
with this idea, participants saw the cat-beater as less likely to
“help the homeless” and more likely to “enjoy the suffering
of others” (Tannenbaum et al., 2011)—both variables related
to harm.
Other studies revealed that people morally condemn the
character of those who commit “objectively” harmless moral
acts (e.g., bizarre masturbation), but again, these acts suggest
someone who will violate other harm-based norms (Uhlmann
& Zhu, 2013). Consider a man who masturbates with a dead
chicken. Although this act is “harmless,” parents likely
would not want him babysitting their daughter for fear of the
harm he might do to her. Consistent with this logic—and
with dyadic morality—research finds a cognitive asymmetry
between harm and “purity,” in which purity violations are
tied to potential harm, but not vice versa (Chakroff, 2015).
Dyadic morality also provides a nuanced perspective on
moral character, suggesting that character is not only about
good versus evil but also about moral agents versus moral
patients. Just as Hollywood actors are typecast into enduring
Hollywood roles, so too are moral actors typecast as either
agents (those who do moral acts) or patients (those who
receive moral acts (Gray & Wegner, 2009). Moral typecasting suggests that, in some ways, the psychological distance
between hero and villain is relatively small because both are
moral agents—explaining why it is easy for heroes to fall
from grace (Weeks, 2012). Conversely, the distance between
victimhood and villainy/heroism is relatively far, explaining
why we assign less blame to victims than to heroes when
they perpetrate wrongs (Gray & Wegner, 2011c)—at least
when their victimhood does not threaten our self-concept
(Gray & Wegner, 2010b).
Typecasting is consistent with classic work in attribution
in which ascriptions of responsibility and control are inversely
related to ascriptions of victimhood (Weiner, 1995). In the
heyday of the AIDS epidemic, research revealed that sympathy for HIV-positive men hinged on whether the sufferer was
seen as a helpless, vulnerable sick man (i.e., a patient), or a
sinful homosexual responsible for his own misfortune (i.e., an
agent; Weiner, 1993). Competing perceptions of agents and
patients also explains why heroes and villains are viewed as
insensitive to pain: The more you do good or evil, the less you
are seen as vulnerable to receiving it.
Political Disagreement—Harm as a Moral Lingua
Franca
Dyadic morality suggests that liberals and conservatives do
not have fundamentally different moral minds, but instead
see harm differently (Schein & Gray, 2015). Consistent with
this idea, studies reveal that both liberals and conservatives
Personality and Social Psychology Review 0(0)
use considerations of harm to decide which of two acts is
more immoral (Schein & Gray, 2015; acts adapted from
Graham & Haidt, 2012). Participants were asked to indicate
whether violations of loyalty (e.g., burning your country’s
flag in private when no one else sees you) or fairness (e.g.,
signing a secret-but-binding pledge to only hire people of
your race in your company) were more immoral. Although
conservatives saw loyalty violations as more wrong, these
comparative moral judgments were underlain by differences
in perceived harm (i.e., conservatives also saw loyalty violations as more harmful; Schein & Gray, 2015).
Links between immorality and harm suggest that moral
gaps can be reduced by decreasing differences in perceived
harm. Consider abortion. Both liberals and conservatives
agree that killing mindless cells (e.g., E. coli bacteria) is permissible, and that killing babies is wrong. Where they disagree is whether a 10-week-old fetus is better understood as
an insensate mass of cells or a vulnerable baby—a question
that may be answered by increased work in fetal medicine.
Of course, minds are ultimately a matter of perception, but
perceptions can be changed. As late as 1971, evangelical
Christians believed that life begins at birth (distinguishing
themselves from Catholics), but now believe that life begins
at conception (Wegner & Gray, 2016).
Even if perceptions of harm are hard to change, simply
acknowledging the legitimacy of perceived harm can help
soothe the rancor of moral debates. When it comes to gay
marriage and feminism, liberals often believe that conservatives are inventing harm simply to antagonize them.
Conversely, conservatives often believe that liberals have a
wanton disregard for the safety of children and the future of
America (Bryant, 1977; Peters, 2016). By understanding that
we all share fundamentally the same moral mind, it may help
us humanize our moral opponents. For example, after we
wrote an op-ed about how many conservatives see gay marriage as causing legitimate suffering (Gray & Schein, 2015),
we received an email from a Baptist pastor who warmly
thanked us for recognizing his harm-based position. Simply
acknowledging that others perceive harm can foster respect,
even when agreement is difficult to reach.
“Moral” Harms
Cultures universally moralize harm, but some harms seem to
be encouraged, such as killing enemies in war (Rai & Fiske,
2012) or crushing the opposition in football games
(Guttmann, 2004). How does dyadic morality square with
such “virtuous violence” (A. P. Fiske & Rai, 2014)? Local
norms about what is common or permissible certainly play
an important role in these acts, but people may also not perceive substantial harm in them. By dementalizing enemies in
war and sports, people fail to see them as capable of suffering
and therefore as undeserving of moral concern, an idea supported by substantial research (Goff et al., 2008; Haslam,
2006). Another explanation for these encouraged harms is
27
Schein and Gray
that they are actually seen as being helpful overall. By killing
an enemy in a foreign country, a soldier may safeguard millions of American lives including his friends and family. By
tackling an opposing player in football, a player may be
building character or inspiring children to exercise.
Even in cases where we seem to acknowledge the pain of
others, it is only unjust if we empathize with it. Empathic
reactions may be innate (Preston & de Waal, 2001), but they
can be dampened through emotion regulation (Cameron &
Payne, 2011), dehumanization (Cameron, Harris, & Payne,
2015), and rationalization (Bandura et al., 1996). Even still,
such flickers of empathy can survive, such as when soldiers
have difficulty shooting at the opposition (Grossman, 2009),
and when individuals defy cultural narratives to help enemies in need (Bilewicz & Jaworska, 2013).
Moral typecasting may also help to explain virtuous violence (Gray & Wegner, 2009). Cultures do not delight at the
suffering of all people, but only at a very small group: the
evil. By inflicting suffering upon the villainous, they are
transformed from agents of evil into mere patients, a process
which serves to nullify their evilness.
Cross-Cultural Differences
Although critics have claimed that dyadic morality denies
cross-cultural moral diversity (Graham et al., 2013), this
characterization is wrong. While TDM may not taxonomize
the specific content of cultural variability, it celebrates moral
diversity via diversity in values, which are moralized when
they are tied to harm. Among all predictions of dyadic morality, this cross-cultural hypothesis is the least tested; however,
some cross-cultural data are suggestive.
Classic anthropological accounts from Shweder reveal
that people link different kinds of suffering to different kinds
of immorality (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997).
In cultures lacking scientific explanations of suffering, these
harmful violations of natural order provide a compelling
“moral causal ontology” (Shweder et al., 1997, p. 422),
potentially explaining the origin of sanctity concerns. A more
recent study finds that cultures moralize chastity and other
sanctity-related concerns when the prevalence of sexually
transmitted diseases rises (Tybur et al., 2013; van Leeuwen,
Park, Koenig, & Graham, 2012), consistent with the causal
role of harm.
However, one study does seem to argue against the crosscultural role of harm by revealing a dissociation between
harm and immorality in explicit judgments of Chinese participants (Buchtel et al., 2015). This sample of Chinese participants viewed morality as more about civility than about
harm, rating it more immoral to not give up your bus seat to
an elderly person than to murder that elderly person. There
are several open questions with this study. First, morality is a
code that govern behaviors, and given that bus-seat keeping
is more prevalent than murder, we must wonder at this conception of “morality.” Second, even Americans have a sense
of “politeness,” and we wonder if the authors merely measured this construction in Chinese culture. Third, dyadic
morality also acknowledges a powerful role of norms in
morality, and norms certainly vary across cultures.
As intention is an important part of harm, TDM suggests
that concerns about the intention behind immorality should
be prevalent cross-culturally. Consistent with this idea, intentionality perception emerges early in development in both
industrialized cultures and in rural, small-scale, traditional
societies (H. C. Barrett et al., 2013). We note that in one
large-scale survey, two traditional societies did not emphasize intentionality in moral judgments (H. C. Barrett et al.,
2016), a phenomenon explained by cultural learning. For
example, one of these societies was the Fijian Yasawan, who
endorse Opacity of Mind norms, the belief that other minds
are unknowable and should not be discussed (J. Robbins &
Rumsey, 2008). Nevertheless, experimentally focusing
Yasawan adults on the thoughts behind actions led to greater
moral differentiation of failed attempts versus accidents,
consistent with the role of intention (McNamara, 2016).
Furthermore, Yasawan children differentiate intent in similar
fashion as Western children (Hamlin, 2013; McNamara,
2016), suggesting an innate moral sensitivity to intentionality that cultural learning is needed to suppress.
Testing Dyadic Morality
Dyadic morality suggests a new model of moral judgment,
and although we have reviewed substantial indirect and
direct evidence in its support, additional research is surely
needed. Here we provide some recommendations for study
design which focus primarily upon the measurement of
harm. We predict that—when they are followed—future
studies will reveal a robust association between perceived
harm and moral judgment. Dyadic morality would be falsified if—when controlling for norms and affect—intuitive
perceptions of harm are not causally linked to intuitive perception of immorality.
Although TDM’s redefinition of harm makes it more
challenging to study, each of its predictions are also falsifiable. The intuitiveness of harm means that harm should be
more bound to moral judgment when it is assessed under
cognitive load or with implicit measures. This is exactly
what studies reveal when assessing judgments of harm and
immorality regarding “purity” violations with time pressure
and implicit measures (Gray, Schein et al., 2014). The perceptual nature of harm also means that participants’ reports
of harm should better predict moral judgment than the
“objective” harm designed by researchers within scenarios.
A continuum of harm means that ratings of harm should
span a range rather than being bimodal, as revealed by previous research (Cushman et al., 2006; Schein & Gray, 2015).
The synthetic nature of harm means that ratings of harm—
and immorality—should be sensitive to manipulations of
intention, causation, and suffering, consistent with empirical
28
evidence (Ames & Fiske, 2013; Cushman, 2015; Schein &
Gray, 2015). Overall, testing the claims of the “new” intuitive harm should be no more difficult than testing the claims
of the "new" intuitive moral judgment, as social psychology
as been doing since 2001 (Greene et al., 2001; Haidt, 2001).
Study Design
Intuitive perceived continuum. Previous research assumed that
acts can be objectively “harmless” (Haidt & Hersh, 2001);
however, TDM suggests that both harm and morality are
intuitively perceived. Accordingly, participants should be
allowed to indicate how harmful or immoral an act seems to
them. Of course, while responses to explicit questions can
help shed light on the structure of our moral cognition, they
might also tap effortful reasoning, so ideally perceptions
should be accessed with implicit measures or under time
pressure to better tap intuitions. Given that both harm and
morality exist along a continuum, researchers should ask
how harmful or immoral an act seems and not just provide
binary options (Piazza & Sousa, 2016).
Synthetic. Harm is not merely suffering, but the dyadic combination of an intentional agent, causal damage, and vulnerable patient. Questions should therefore assess both global
perceptions of harm, and the specific elements of the dyad—
along with relevant perceptions of mind such as agent’s
intention and a patient’s vulnerability, both in terms of general capacity (e.g., how capable is x of suffering or intention?), and its specific manifestation in an act (e.g., how
much did x intend or suffer from this act?).
Controls. To test the specific role of harm, and to separate
“moral wrongness” from “general wrongness” studies should
also assess the role of general negativity (i.e., unpleasantness)
and also weirdness and typicality, which are tied to norms
(Gray & Keeney, 2015b). For more discussion on appropriate
controls, see Cameron, Lindquist, and Gray (2015).
Capturing the full continuum of immorality and harm. Scenarios
used to tap moral judgment should assess the full continuum
of immorality and harm by including scenarios that are
canonically immoral (e.g., murder), canonically not immoral
(e.g., jogging), and all points between. Without this full
range, erroneous conclusions could be reached. For example,
most studies testing the disgust–immorality link use only
morally ambiguous and disgusting scenarios such as eating a
dead dog or buying sexually explicit music (Haidt, 2001;
Horberg et al., 2009). When a broader set of scenarios is used
(e.g., murder and cleaning up poop), the unique impact of
disgust disappears and the role of harm is clearly apparent
(Schein & Gray, 2015). Ideally, scenarios should also capture
variation along many dimensions, including act severity,
weirdness, intentionality, general negativity, and the specific
value being violated.
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Naturalistic scenarios. Morality evolved to deal with challenges typical in ancestral societies, and cultural learning has
evolved to focus upon challenges typical in today’s societies.
To assess moral cognition, scenarios should tap these everyday challenges rather than bizarre cases invented by researchers. For example, to assess morality related to purity, we
have developed a set of stimuli reflecting naturalistic violations (e.g., prostitution, adultery; Gray & Keeney, 2015b).
Areas of Investigation
Tests of dyadic morality may be especially useful when they
interface with four emerging areas in moral psychology.
Moralization. Anthropological and historical research has
shown how moral judgments evolve over time and place
(e.g., Laqueur, 2004). Dyadic morality predicts that moralization is driven by changes in perceived harm, whether
because of systemic forces or random variation (Schein &
Gray, 2017). The coherence processes of dyadic morality
also predicts that it will be easier for an act to enter the moral
sphere than exit it. Once a dyadic loop is initiated and an act
is categorized as immoral, rationally eliminating one type of
harm might not be sufficient, as dyadic completion will
likely lead to harm being perceived elsewhere (for expanded
predictions of moralization and demoralization, see Schein
& Gray, 2016; 2017).
Religion. Religion and morality are intricately connected,
with religious doctrine informing moral judgments, and
binding individuals into communities (Graham & Haidt,
2010; Nucci & Turiel, 1993). Dyadic morality predicts that
religious moral doctrine is shaped by historical and evolutionary threats (Douglas, 1966), which then shapes proximal
perceptions of harm, consistent with the dyad loop.
Taxonomies. More empirical research is also needed to help
bridge TDM with work categorizing moral diversity (Haidt
et al., 1993; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013; Rai & Fiske,
2011). For example, one could integrate TDM with the Relationship Regulation Model (Rai & Fiske, 2011), asking how
different types of relationship structures transform perceptions of harm. Theoretical models can also help organize
types of harms to different patients (e.g., the self, others,
society), as in the MMM (Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013).
Individual differences. TDM predicts that individual differences
in threat sensitivity (i.e., perceived potential harm) should correspond to moral condemnation. This prediction is consistent
with past findings showing that individual differences in threat
sensitivity underlies political differences (Jost et al., 2007),
and the differential moral condemnation of both disgust
(Schein, Ritter, & Gray, 2016) and diverse violations (van
Leeuwen & Park, 2009). Future research should also explore
systematic variations in where exactly people see harm.
Schein and Gray
29
Conclusion
3. An interesting tidbit on the potential randomness of moral
change—one historian suggests that the pamphlet’s anonymous writer “invented a new disease” as a way to earn an
income selling snake oil (Laqueur, 2004, p. 14).
4. Of course, these numbers may not be fully independent, as some
acts (e.g., defiling) better align with certain patients (e.g., souls),
but the general point of combinatorial explosion still holds.
Viable theories of moral cognition should address several
key questions: What constitutes moral judgments and differentiates them from other types of judgments? What accounts
for moral pluralism? How are moral judgments made? How
do acts enter the moral realm, and how are they entrenched?
Dyadic morality provides testable answers to each of
these questions—answers which highlight the importance of
harm. This is not the reasoned, objective, and binary harm
of old, but instead an intuitively perceived continuum, which
is instantiated as a fuzzy cognitive template. This cognitive
template is rooted in evolutionary concerns about proximate
harm, but can be modified by cultural assumptions about
more distal harms.
Consistent with traditional harm-centric accounts, TDM
suggests that harm separates “conventional” negative norm
violations from violations of morality (Turiel, 1983).
However, consistent with modern moral pluralism, TDM
allows for cultural diversity through the flexibility of harm
and a variety of values. By allowing for diversity within a
single synthetic template, dyadic morality provides parsimony and pluralism.
There are two quotes which best summarize the aspirations of dyadic morality. The first is from moral anthropologist Rick Shweder (2012), who advocates for “universality
without the uniformity” (p. 88). We suggest that a flexible
harm-based template allows for a universal understanding of
morality in tandem with rich cultural diversity. The second
quote is from Felix Mendelssohn, who suggested that “the
essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.” The essence of
morality is also unity in variety—cognitive unity in the variety of perceived harm.
Acknowledgments
For helpful feedback, the authors thank Emmie Banks, Tommy
Savransky, Sarah Ammons, and three anonymous reviewers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This
study was supported by the Templeton Funded Imagination Institute
(RFP-15-11), National Science Foundation (SES-1534083), Russell
Sage Foundation (93-16-08), and Charles Koch Foundation.
Notes
1. More than 80% of people intuitively judge acts like these as
immoral (Hester, Payne, & Gray, 2017)
2. In self-defense (e.g., shooting someone who is stabbing you),
it is unclear which person is the agent and patient, causing
ambiguity in moral judgment.
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